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Feb. 24, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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God, Consciousness, and the Theories of Everything | Curt Jaimungal | EP 229

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	If our perceptions evolved, and we evolved to adapt to reality, and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality, then what does that say about reality?
	And the answer to that question is not bloody obvious.
	Well, that's another question I hope that I can get to with Dawkins.
	And maybe he knows something that I don't.
	God, I hope so.
	Yeah.
	See, I want to make the claim that it sounds then, and I believe you've made this claim, perhaps even Viveki, that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily, the most quote-unquote real it is.
	However, however, then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out.
	And then the closer we are to that, the closer our map is to that reality.
	Of course, we're not trying to mistake the map and the territory.
	Well, whether or not material objects exist...
	Patterns exist, right?
	And it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are.
	Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have with me Kurt Jai-Mungle. I'm pleased today to have with me Kurt Jai-Mungle.
	He's a Toronto-based filmmaker with a background in mathematics and physics, who directed and wrote the film Better Left Unsaid, which was released in April 2021.
	That film explores the question of, among other things, when does the left go too far?
	He's also the host of the Theories of Everything podcast and YouTube channel, which explores consciousness, God, free will, theoretical physics, and which just surpassed 100,000 subscribers in about one year's time.
	He's interviewed people including Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and John Verveke on the cognitive science side, and Stephen Wolfram, Eric Weinstein, and Sabine Hossenfelder.
	On the physics side, you can find out more by visiting youtube.com forward slash theories of everything or searching theories of everything on Spotify, iTunes, or virtually any of the other audio platforms.
	So, you've been podcasting and running this YouTube channel for how long?
	About a year?
	Yeah, slightly longer than a year.
	Now the channel's been up for approximately three years in the sense that it was registered three years ago, but I've been going at it with force for about one year and a bit.
	So who have you interviewed that's been most popular?
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	Noam Chomsky, and you're one of the reasons why, because I was the first person, if not the only person, to ask him about you directly.
	Uh-oh.
	So I don't know about that.
	So there's something we could talk about right away.
	So what did he have to say?
	Well, essentially, you're Hitler, as you know.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And so why do you think he thinks that?
	Yeah.
	I think that people who are on a certain side on the political spectrum believe their side stands for what's good.
	And the opposite side is what's not good.
	One of the...
	See, that's so tricky, man, talking about better left than said, which we'll get to later, is how do you define the left and the right?
	It's decidedly difficult.
	Almost everyone has a different definition.
	Chomsky would say, well, the left is freedom.
	And so anything that's on the right is anti-freedom.
	And the right, people who are on the right or identify with being as such, would perhaps categorize it as the opposite.
	Yeah, well, it's interesting, at least, that they might circle around claims to some, let's say, virtue that both of them would admire, like freedom.
	Right, so there's some agreement there, despite the difference.
	Did he point to anything particular about what I hypothetically thought that made me not an acceptable sort of creature?
	No.
	It's somewhat hearsay in the sense that he read an article based on you, so he didn't watch you directly.
	He read Nathan Robinson's critique of you, which I'm sure...
	Oh yeah, well that'll do it, man.
	Yeah, old Nathan.
	He's quite the character.
	Yeah, I see.
	So...
	Well, that's too bad, in many regards.
	Did you learn anything in particular from talking to Dr.
	Chomsky?
	Quite a significant amount.
	As for what I can point to, let me think.
	I spoke to him six times.
	Six times on the channel.
	So the first time about you, I found it interesting that he said...
	I asked each guest that I spoke to at the time, because now I've pivoted away from politics for reasons we can get to later.
	I asked him and every other guest, when does the left go too far?
	In some sense, it's a Petersonian question, because you've raised that quite a few times.
	When does the left go too far?
	He said, well, it's not a matter of going too far for the left.
	It's a matter of tactics.
	As for when does the right go too far?
	He said, well, the right is suicidal, I think was his words.
	Hmm.
	So that's interesting, because it's really not much of an answer.
	I mean, I've been always looking for a technical definition of that, right?
	It's like, well, we know the right can go too far, and we know the left can go too far, and how do we point to...
	And I think this problem has actually become more complicated rather than less, because the more I've been thinking about it, the more I think that the errors on the left are more in the nature of a vast number of small errors, mostly of...
	Often of omission.
	So the more reasonable people on the left kowtow too rapidly to the more radical types on the left, especially at the philosophical level.
	And I think that really happened at the universities.
	So that's something we can explore.
	Well, it's actually a question I would have for you.
	Why do you think that is?
	I know that this is mainly you interviewing me, but I'm still perplexed when it comes to that.
	Why is it that the center left doesn't excoriate the extreme left?
	Is it because it's They're on the same side, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
	Or are they afraid?
	Because, well, you can lose even a tenured position.
	Well, I think that fear...
	And it isn't obvious to me that this is merely a problem that affects the left, but I'm most familiar with it in the university circumstance.
	And so what I saw happening in my 25 years as a faculty member, let's say, I think that's about right.
	It's more than that, actually.
	But anyways, quite a long time, three decades, let's say, was that whenever the administration pushed on the faculty...
	So in our faculty meetings, for example, there would be administrative demands, and they were often unreasonable.
	They would increase the size of our seminars, say, for our third and fourth year students, ask us to do more work with fewer resources.
	And that was a steady trend.
	Like if you look at spending, say, on faculty salaries, Versus spending on administrative salaries across universities in the West, broadly speaking, but certainly in North America, the amount spent on administration just skyrocketed upward, whereas the amount spent on faculty pretty much stayed constant.
	And so why?
	Well, it was because the faculty just retreated continually every time they were challenged to say no.
	And so I objected repeatedly in faculty meetings whenever that happened and said, well, why don't we just say no?
	They want to increase our seminar size, you know, like double it, let's say, for third years.
	That's not a seminar anymore.
	Once you get to a certain point, we just say, no, we're not doing that.
	Why don't we just say no?
	We won't do that.
	Well, then they won't give us what we want.
	Well, they don't give you what you want anyways.
	So, like, what's to lose?
	But so it was a thousand tiny retreats.
	And then what happened after that was that the administration, having grown too top-heavy, was taken over by people within the administration, let's say, who had this DEI philosophy, and they couldn't say no to them.
	So, now, so when did the left go too far?
	Well, it was micro-retreats, continual cowardly micro-retreats at the university level.
	Now, sorry to be so long-winded about this, but there was something even more brutal underneath all that philosophically, which I'm trying to lay out in a new book that I'm writing, which is this post-modern problem.
	And The postmodern problem really emerged in the 1960s with the simultaneous realization across a number of disciplines that there's almost an infinite number of ways of perceiving anything.
	And I mean literally perceiving.
	So when you look at the world, you see these things you think are objects, and they're sort of self-evident.
	But where an object begins and where it ends is much more difficult to compute than any one ever realized, which is partly why we don't have, you know, robots wandering around doing things like dishwashing, which turns out to be insanely complex.
	And it also emerged in literary criticism with the realization that, well, just as there were an indefinite number of ways of looking at something, so actually acquiring the objective facts of perception, there was an even more vaguely indefinable way there was an even more vaguely indefinable way of potentially interpreting a text or a canon of texts, let's say.
	So how do we decide what's good and what's bad literature?
	What's deep and what's shallow?
	What's valid and invalid?
	And the answer is, we don't know.
	That's the answer.
	But a premature answer was generated by social critics on the left.
	And the premature answer was, well, all our categories and the act of categorization itself serve the will to power.
	And that's true to some degree, because we're all totalitarian and authoritarian and narcissistic to some degree.
	We also use deception to get what we want.
	So we can corrupt our category structure, but there's a huge difference between saying, well, we don't know the answer, but power may play a role, and saying, the answer is that power always plays a role, and that's all there is.
	And that's what's happened on the left in the postmodern field.
	And that sort of fit in nicely with the, you know, the idea that capitalism was essentially oppressive and that the patriarchal structure is essentially oppressive, etc., etc.
	And it's an unbelievably corrosive and terrible thing.
	So, well, the left went too far there to claim that nothing but the will to power governs categorization, and the act of categorization, which is basically consciousness itself, that act of categorization, that you could not possibly formulate a more cynical, malevolent, and careless, destructive philosophy.
	So...
	So you interpreted the question as a time question, temporal one, when does the left go too far?
	And I guess that's within when.
	And for me, what you also laid out Ideologically, what it is that they believe that makes them go too far.
	I don't like to use the word ideological.
	We don't have to get into the into the reasons there.
	But for the sake of speaking right now, just use that word.
	Why?
	When do they go too far ideologically?
	See, some of the people I spoke to said the left goes too far when it comes to violence.
	Well, there's something that leads to the violence, some idea.
	And you also mentioned power.
	Right, that also doesn't distinguish the left going too far from the right going too far, right?
	So, and it's not a really good answer, because sometimes we think that violence is justified, like in self-defense, and often political violence is, what would you say, rationalized, and sometimes perhaps even functions as self-defense.
	And sometimes it's rebellion against True oppression, in which case people on the left and the right might regard violence not only as necessary, but actually morally demanded, right?
	Ethically demanded.
	So the mere use of violence, and then, of course, what constitutes violence, that's the next problem with that.
	It's too shallow an argument to really get to the core of things.
	One has to be extremely careful about what Counts as self-defense, especially preemptive self-defense, which is behind much of what they do.
	They'll say that, well, we have to take action now against the right or the extreme right, which pretty much everyone who was on the right, they would classify as being a part of the alt-right or alt-light.
	Yeah, well, that's another part.
	Yeah, that's another.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, that's another part of this tit-for-tat process that we see, I think, perhaps accelerating it, particularly in the United States with the return of Trump, let's say, to the political arena.
	And there's a tremendous amount of distrust, growing distrust on both sides of the political spectrum driven by Well, that's the question.
	Driven by what?
	Certainly by the extreme views of a minority on both sides.
	Laying out the exact causal process is extremely difficult because these things, they're not unidirectionally causal, right?
	They're They cause, each causes the other.
	You know, I poke you, you poke me.
	I slap you, you slap me a little harder.
	I punch you, you punch me.
	You know, and then we have knives and we're at each other's throats.
	And we say, well, you know, who started it?
	Well, maybe you said something insulting before I poked you.
	You know, but one of the things of interest when observing something like that is the causal process that's involved in the tit-for-tat return.
	And I've been thinking about that a lot because I'm, for a whole variety of reasons that I can't go into.
	But Jonathan Haidt also just wrote an article about positive feedback loop processes operating at a very rapid scale on Facebook and Twitter and exacerbating this political positive feedback loop, right?
	Runaway positive feedback loop.
	You know, if you're doing any recording and you bring your microphone too close to the speaker that...
	That you're speaking through, you'll get this howl of feedback, and that can destroy the whole system, the whole recording system.
	And that's a good example of how a positive feedback loop can get out of control.
	And that's the real enemy.
	Like, if we're thinking meta-politically, the real enemy is the possibility that...
	Mutual distrust on both sides will accelerate our descent into a kind of melee.
	And so the enemy isn't necessarily the catastrophic ideology of the left or the right, but the manner in which extreme views can foster a spiral of violence that none of us know how to stop.
	And stupid little things can trigger it.
	Like one of my friends today sent me this article showing that, I think it was in the Virginia governor's race, that Four people used ticky lanterns and they were hypothetically marching in support of the Republican candidate and so they were posing as members of the conspiratorial alt-right but two of them were actually Democrat operatives, political operatives trying to discredit the Republican campaign.
	And that's so dangerous because they're basically acting out the proposition that it's Nazis, you know, for all intents and purposes, fascists that are supporting the Republicans.
	And that's such a terrible lie, right?
	It's such a terrible lie to act that out, to demonize your fellow citizens that way.
	It's unbelievably dangerous.
	And we've got to stop doing things like that, you know?
	All of us have to stop doing things like that.
	Right.
	That may be at the bottom of it.
	There's so many ways that this can be taken.
	And I think that what, well, it's difficult to say what's at the bottom, but one of the predominant factors may be personalized.
	Personal lies, not personalized.
	Yes, I believe that.
	I really do believe.
	Why do you say that?
	Right.
	See, if you watch the film toward the fourth section, I believe I split it up into chapters, and in the fourth section, it becomes much more philosophical, which is one of the reasons why I started it, because I happen to like puzzles and philosophy.
	It's one of the reasons I went into math.
	I like abstract thinking.
	So I tried to make a case about lies and how lies spread.
	Now, there's one obvious route to take that with memes.
	So you talk about memes and how memes spread.
	So you don't want to pollute that because that comes back to affect you if you care about yourself, first of all.
	So maybe you shouldn't care about yourself so much.
	As for Hmm.
	See, something I was exploring, and I'm not quite sure.
	Is it possible to tell a lie without lying to yourself?
	Now, it seems, on the face of it, yes.
	Well, I don't think so.
	Well, there is psychological evidence.
	Well, there's psychological evidence, though, that you can't.
	Well, here, let's dig into that a little bit.
	So, you tell a lie to yourself, and you think, well, I know the difference.
	It's like, well...
	Don't be so sure about that.
	So here's one experiment that's an example.
	So imagine that I give a group of people a scale that measures their political belief about a certain issue.
	Maybe the reality of climate change or the unreality of climate change for that matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	And then I get those same people to write an essay of 500 words outlining the contrary position.
	And they know they're just doing it because it's part of the experiment.
	But then they come back a week later and I give them the same political belief scale.
	And what's happened is their beliefs will have shifted substantially towards the side that they argued for.
	Okay, so why?
	Well, first of all, a lot of your so-called beliefs are really low resolution.
	They're just heuristics.
	They're like single pixel images.
	You haven't thought it through very carefully.
	Imagine maybe you know more than the average person because of your background.
	But imagine how much you know about how a helicopter works.
	You know, do you know what a helicopter is?
	Yes.
	No, you don't.
	If you had to draw one, it would look like a four-year-old drew it.
	You know, you know what it, you can identify the shape in two dimensions.
	You know it flies.
	That's about it.
	You couldn't fix one.
	You certainly couldn't build one.
	So, in a real sense, you don't know anything about a helicopter, except what you need, as someone who's never around helicopters, to know.
	And most things are way more complicated than helicopters, even though they're plenty complicated.
	And so, you think that you know something when you think you know it, but then you detail out a counter-argument And it turns out that you've provided more detail in the counter-argument that you had in your argument to begin with.
	And so that shifts your cognition towards what you argued for.
	Well, if you think that doesn't happen to you when you're lying, well, you don't know anything about how you work.
	And then the other thing is, well...
	Virtually no one thinks that lying is acceptable morally when it comes right down to it.
	There might be specific exceptions to that now and then.
	And so if you lie, you're going to tilt what you believe towards the lie because that will lighten the ethical load that you carry.
	It'll reduce cognitive dissonance.
	That's one way of terming it.
	And then you can't keep track of your lies, so that's a big problem, and they tangle up your thoughts.
	And then also, let's say a whole bunch of people really like your lie.
	Well, then, you know, most of us, all of us thrive on attention.
	I mean, children will misbehave to get attention, even if it's negative attention, if they can't get it any other way.
	And so you lie and you put it out on Twitter and, you know, 10,000 people like it.
	And then you think, well, wait a sec.
	Probably I believe that because look at how positively it was received.
	And some of that's actually socially positive, right?
	I mean, if you say something and a lot of people respond to it positively, that might be a good reason for you to think that way a bit more, right?
	Because the fact that you want social approval isn't only an index of your cowardice, it's also an index of your desire to be productive and to fit in and to have people like you and all of that.
	And so, lies, they just warp things to a tremendous degree.
	And if you think you're smart enough to keep your lies separate from your truth...
	And then one final issue is...
	Well, let's say you lie 20% of the time.
	Well, doesn't that mean that you're practicing to become 20% a liar?
	And don't you think you're getting better at that?
	You become what you practice.
	And then don't you think that'll interfere with your ability to distinguish between what you think and what you don't think, first of all, and also your ability to tell the difference between truth and falsehood?
	And so, Dan, don't you think it'll make you cynical about the nature of humankind to observe yourself lying?
	You're certainly going to think other people do it, at least as much as you.
	And if they're bad people, they do it way more.
	It's just a rat's nest.
	And, you know, I became convinced a long time ago, looking at the totalitarian problem on the left and the right, that the most effective way to deal with this fundamentally was psychological, and that what we need to do, all of us, is to stop lying, each of us, in our own lives.
	That's the solution.
	We have to stop.
	And partly that's because we're so damn powerful now.
	I mean, how many people have watched your podcasts, do you think?
	In terms of views now, obviously there are multiple views for one video.
	Millions, almost 7 or so, 7 or 8 million.
	Okay, so how powerful might your lies be?
	Right.
	Right?
	And I mean, each of those million people is connected to a thousand other people.
	So that's a billion people that you're two steps away from, at least.
	So you said, sorry, you said seven million people.
	So it's seven billion people.
	You know, I mean, obviously those circles are going to overlap, but you get my point.
	Yeah, what I would object to is that you said most people would agree that telling lies is deleterious in some manner.
	Now, I'd say that they say that, they profess it, but they don't truly believe it.
	And that may, in fact, be what unifies the extremes.
	I'll give you an example.
	Sure.
	If you ask someone, I think that if you were to ask someone, is it okay to lie for the greater good?
	They would say, well, the majority of those people on the extremes would say yes.
	And then I wonder, well, perhaps that's an indication that you're on the extreme.
	Perhaps if you have a worldview, I talk about this concept called Beltan Shaum.
	That's a good idea, man.
	Yeah.
	Perhaps if you have a Beltan Shaum that says that there is no...
	That somehow there is no greater, somehow you can't tell a lie and be for the greater good because the truth and the good are tied.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	So that's a really smart idea.
	The idea that if you have a belief system politically that requires any lies to support, then that's an indication that you've gone too far.
	I think that's a good rule of thumb.
	Right.
	And what else is, as you mentioned, it's pestiferous because it's poisonous, is that they'll say power is one of the, well, they'll say power is the predominant, perhaps only factor that underlies our social interactions and even truth claims and so on.
	Well, the issue with that is that it's partly true.
	And the reason is, See this cup here.
	This cup comprises many elements.
	There's an element of power in this cup.
	There's an element of art as well, by the way.
	There's an element of physics.
	You can look at it mathematically.
	You can look at it through an engineering lens.
	You can look at it through an architectural lens.
	Yeah, well, the power in the cup is, for example, that you own it.
	It's your cup.
	Right?
	And so it's embedded within a hierarchy.
	Now, your claim is exactly right.
	But there's a huge difference between claiming that it's useful to investigate the role that arbitrary expression of power plays in conceptual systems, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and the premature answer that the The solution to the problem of perception is will to power and nothing else.
	So I've been talking to some evolutionary biologists about that.
	I talked to Robert Trivers this week.
	He's getting old and it was interesting to talk to him.
	But we talked about psychopaths.
	Okay, so let's wander down that path just for a minute.
	So imagine that the patriarchal structure is predicated on nothing but power.
	Okay, and then imagine that psychopaths are particularly cunning users of power.
	Okay, so then, to the degree that the social system is an expression of power, you'd expect psychopaths to be radically successful.
	But they...
	In human populations...
	Temporarily successful.
	Well, they also never exceed.
	Their numbers vary between 1% and 5% in the population.
	It never gets higher than 3% is really the upper limit, but it can get up to 5%.
	So they're not that successful because 97% of people aren't psychopaths.
	So, just that fact alone indicates that there's something wrong with the power claim.
	Now, you might say, well, psychopaths aren't very good at utilizing power.
	It's like, no, no, wait a minute.
	Actually, psychopaths are better at utilizing pure power, stripped completely of empathy, than anyone else, by definition.
	So they are literally the power users who lack compassion.
	So why aren't they radically successful in human populations?
	And the answer to that is, well, because our hierarchies are not fundamentally built on power, and our concepts and perceptions aren't fundamentally a consequence of power or its misuse.
	Now, that doesn't mean that...
	Our perceptions and our social structures and our intimate relationships, our relationships with ourselves for that matter, can't become contaminated by the excess desire for power and by the deceit that might be employed, let's say, in its service.
	Obviously that happens and we have to keep our eyes open all the time about that.
	But the central claim is not only is it Unbelievably cynical and destructive and also extremely helpful if you want to demonize your enemies.
	You know, because if I believe that the entire basis of your perceptual structure is will to power, and so is mine, let's say.
	Well, I don't...
	If you don't believe the same things I do, so if you're trying to elevate yourself in a different hierarchy or you're trying to produce a different hierarchy altogether, we have nothing in common except...
	Our enmity.
	Because there's no ground outside what you're striving for and what I'm striving for selfishly where we can meet as reasonable people and have a, you know, soul to soul discussion.
	That's not even technically possible within that frame, within that scheme.
	And so that means that if you and I are enemies, well, what am I supposed to do with you?
	Because all you are is will to power.
	I can't trust you.
	I can't reason with you.
	Reason doesn't even exist.
	You see echoes of that in the claims that rational discussion or something like that is, you know, especially dialectical forms, is somehow a construction of white supremacy You know, implicit in our social structures.
	It's so, it's so shallow, that idea.
	And the idea that our virtues, first of all, that there aren't any virtues, but even if there are, they're only derivable from power hierarchy structures.
	God, that's so cynical and so destructive and so dangerous.
	And imagine just living with that notion that that's what motivates everyone, is nothing but like an untrammeled will to authoritarian power.
	God!
	That's hell, man!
	Yeah.
	You mentioned the word use multiple times, and that is one of the reasons why I try to analyze it more philosophically toward the end, because I don't think that this is...
	See, some people would say, what we need is dialogue.
	You'll hear this many of the times it would come from people who are on the center, center right, center left.
	They'll say, we just need to speak to each other more.
	But I think what comes before, what comes prior to speaking is we need to value the same...
	We need to be oriented in the same direction.
	Yeah, well, that's, again, what this new book that I'm writing is about, you know, because there has to be an initial framework, as you said, that makes even the possibility of dialogue a reality.
	So it's got to be something.
	Look, look at what we're doing right now, you and me.
	Hopefully, this is what we're doing, right?
	It's like, you know some things, and I know, yeah, that's right, man, hopefully.
	And let's bloody well pray that we are smart enough and wise enough and careful enough to do it, right?
	No, it's not easy.
	You come to this discussion thinking maybe you don't know everything and that I might have something to say that would be useful and interesting to you, that might actually be crucial to you, and I come to this dialogue hoping for the same from you, right?
	So first of all, we both come to the degree we're doing this properly in an attitude of humility.
	I want to hear from you.
	And, you know, I tend to be kind of dominant in conversations and I talk too much and so that probably interferes with it to some degree, but I really do try to listen and I really do hope that when I talk to someone, that's partly why I do the podcast, is that they'll tell me something that someone as stupid and potentially malevolent as me might really need to know.
	And so if I listen real carefully...
	know what it is that i need to know that they know but if i listen very carefully i can kind of call it out of them and then i can use that information to correct myself so i don't do something catastrophically stupid in the future and hurt myself and the people i love and so you have to have this presumption of this presumption of ignorance and the the belief that the person across from you particularly if they differ from you might have something useful to say because they're different from you.
	They know things that aren't that you don't know.
	So isn't it so good that they're different?
	And then you have to believe that men of goodwill exist, let's say, and that they can exchange information that's mutually corrective and both can walk away better.
	And that's something like faith.
	It's faith.
	Well, I think it's equivalent in the Christian sphere.
	It's equivalent to the faith in Logos.
	It's the same thing.
	And Logos is a very complicated concept.
	One of the reasons, and I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but one of the reasons this Theories of Everything podcast has taken off the way that it has is partly because I'm not averse to this Ambiguous, contradictory thinking when it comes to metaphysical issues, like whether or not there exists a God, and to speak in terms of religious terms, most scientists are, as you know, and as I know, most scientists are, they find that to be anathema.
	And I don't...
	Hey, I'm gonna talk to Richard Dawkins.
	Oh, well, that's wonderful.
	Yeah, I saw your conversation with Lawrence Krauss, and I was, well...
	Yeah, I did another one with Harris, too, just a week and a half ago, and it went real well.
	I figured out how to talk to Sam better than I have before.
	I just asked, mostly I just asked him questions, and that's really useful, just to ask questions, rather than...
	Because I think I went sideways to some degree in my discussions with Sam, which I don't usually do.
	I was trying to prove something.
	What do you mean, sideways?
	Well...
	Well, like I said, I was trying to prove something instead of listening and asking questions.
	And I should...
	It would have been better had I not tried to do that and just tried harder and harder to understand what it was that he thought.
	Because, you know, the more we talked, the more we found, like, real major points of agreement.
	You know, like, Sam is oriented...
	To a great degree, he's very much concerned about the human tendency for atrocity and malevolence.
	That drives him.
	That terror of that.
	I would say that's my fundamental driver.
	I hope it is, at least.
	So that's something that really unites us.
	And he's hoping that he can find...
	You know, a genuine morality.
	Now, he believes he can find it in scientific inquiry, and I don't think that's true, but whatever, he might be right.
	And it's not like I don't think science can inform our moral choices, and maybe has to.
	But, you know, when I came out on the public sphere and first talked to Sam, I had this axe to grind in some sense, which was my belief that the fundamental framework...
	From within which we see the world isn't and can't be objective.
	And I still believe that's true, but I was hammering it home because I wanted to win that argument.
	And that wasn't the most sophisticated way of going about it.
	Less and less, I think, as we talked.
	So, and this time I didn't do that at all.
	I just asked him questions and we definitely had the best conversation we've ever had.
	So, and I'm really hoping to do that with Dawkins.
	It's like, I don't want to win an argument.
	I don't want to have an argument.
	I want to ask him questions.
	I want to find out what he thinks because Dawkins is no fool.
	Great.
	And his atheistic materialism grounded in his evolutionary thinking, like...
	That's powerful.
	You know, it's a powerful system of thought, and he's a master of it.
	And so, I want to find out what led him to the conclusions that he came to.
	And I have questions for him, you know.
	I want to talk to him, for example, about the instinct to imitate.
	Because you were talking earlier about something that unites us, you know.
	So, imagine this, for example.
	You know that the same person can be admired by a lot of different people, even people who differ in their political beliefs.
	And that admiration sort of captures them.
	That's charisma.
	That's part of charisma.
	The charisma is part of an instinct, right?
	Because if I think you're charismatic, then I'm going to watch you more.
	My eyes are going to point to you more.
	I'm going to be more likely to do the things you do.
	I'm more likely to imitate you.
	And so I would say there's something like a central spirit that we're all driven to imitate.
	And it's the thing that we see as admirable across people.
	And that points to something that we experience as religious.
	So like the ultimate expression of that which compels imitation is indistinguishable from religious worship.
	It's not propositional.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's a Verveckian argument.
	Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
	Well, and Vervecki's one of the people who's thought this sort of thing through in most detail.
	Jonathan Paggio as well, and I know you had him.
	Did he make the cut of your film?
	Yeah, and the director's cut.
	So just for people who are watching, if you'd like to watch the film, it's best to go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there, instead of iTunes and YouTube and so on, which you can also get it from if you'd like, if that's easier, but you can go to the URL betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there, for the same price, you get access to the director's cut, which has Jonathan Pejot.
	And I'm sure the listeners, the watchers of this are fans of Jonathan Pejot.
	Yeah, well, I think Pajot is super smart, man.
	He's deep.
	And the same with Vervecki.
	Those two, they've taken certain forms of thought farther than anybody I've ever met.
	Vervecki is so well-read.
	It's terrifying.
	And Pajot is this weird character because he really understands postmodern thinking.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, that's part of having an artistic temperament, too.
	People like that, who are more open in trait terms, they can see patterns in things.
	Now, that can lead them astray, because you can project patterns into the void, let's say, that aren't there.
	That's conspiratorial thinking, for example.
	But intuitive people...
	Who are also capable of critical thinking pick up patterns long before anyone else does.
	I've had graduate students like that, you know.
	They would leap to a scientific conclusion that was dead on multiple times.
	And then when they were writing their papers, they'd have to fill in how they got there.
	Well, that wasn't how they got there.
	They leaped from mountaintop to mountaintop using Nietzsche's terminology.
	And they could see patterns.
	And then they had to construct a rational story to publish their ideas in scientific journals.
	It's so funny because it's a form of falsification, right?
	That isn't how they got there.
	So that's one of the questions I want to ask Dawkins.
	It's like, well, what about this instinct to imitate?
	Do you think such a thing exists?
	Because I don't believe he's a blank slate theorist.
	And we're really good at abstracting out things to imitate.
	And so I started thinking about this, for example, when I was watching my kids play house.
	So my son would act out the father, you know, he'd be the father, but he wasn't imitating me exactly.
	He wasn't mimicking the exact gestures of my body, right?
	Like I do this while I'm imitating you right now.
	But if I was a comedian and I wanted to parody you, I would imitate your spirit in some sense, right?
	And then put a twist in it and everyone would laugh.
	So I can abstract out from you your pattern.
	Well then imagine we're way better at it than that.
	Like, if I watched ten admirable men and was gripped by my admiration for them, let's say I was fortunate enough to have ten admirable men in my family, I could abstract out the central spirit that makes them all admirable and I could imitate that.
	So what occurs when you keep doing that over and over?
	That's exactly right, across generations.
	And so now partly what occurs is the imagination formulates the representation of the abstraction.
	So I'll give you an example.
	So if you look and you often see this in Byzantine cathedrals.
	So you look up in a Byzantine cathedral.
	It's a dome, so that's the sky.
	And maybe you'll see an image of Christ up there as Panto Creator, right?
	Creator of the world.
	And this is sort of tied with the idea that consciousness gives rise to reality.
	So it's an idealistic philosophy or experience.
	Well, the idea is something like...
	That's the thing to be admired.
	It's the central phenomena and function of consciousness.
	And in some sense, it gives rise to the reality that is good itself.
	And the imagination gets there way before the propositional philosophers.
	Way before the artists and the religious dreamers.
	You made an argument that that is partly, at least, what is a religious phenomenon.
	Now, do you think that's only it?
	No.
	I have another definition that I'm working out.
	Okay, so these are things I'm going to talk about when I go to Cambridge, because I'm going there to Oxford and Cambridge at the end of November.
	In any case, so I'm also really interested in the idea of depth.
	So we all have an intuition of, yeah, depth, D-E-P-T-H, like philosophical depth or literary depth or the depth of a conversation.
	You know, if you have a deep conversation, you know you're talking about weighty, serious, yeah, fundamental things.
	Okay, well, I have a technical definition for that.
	We have a hierarchy of beliefs.
	Okay, some beliefs have more beliefs dependent on them than others.
	The more beliefs that are dependent on a given belief, the deeper that belief is.
	The deepest of those beliefs we hold sacred by definition.
	By definition.
	Our deepest beliefs are sacred.
	They're primary.
	And you can tell that in part because if they're challenged, you get unbelievably upset.
	And the reason you get upset is because, well, you're not just destabilizing that belief.
	You're destabilizing all the beliefs that depend on it.
	And so one sacred belief in a marriage is sexual fidelity, let's say, faithfulness.
	kind of take that on faith because well you take it's on faith that you think that's valuable in part but it's also on faith that your partner is manifesting that because you you know all you have to do is get paranoid and then you've you can accumulate evidence that your partner isn't trustworthy and no one's perfectly trustworthy so you could see how right exactly so but it's a fundamental belief and then if you find out that your partners betrayed you
	well then the whole house of cards perhaps not the whole house of cards but a lot of the cards come tumbling down you know the past is no longer what you thought it was Your whole faith in humanity itself might be compromised, including your faith in yourself.
	It's a dagger in the depths, especially if you really loved the person and really trusted them.
	So, the more sacred a belief is, the deeper it is embedded in this structure of beliefs.
	And I don't believe those are objective beliefs.
	That's another thing I want to talk to Dawkins about.
	I do not think the scientific evidence suggests that our perceptions, that what we perceive are material objects that are self-evident, that we then derive our conceptual systems from.
	I don't think there's any evidence for that.
	I think it's wrong, and it's been proven wrong.
	So you know, that's some of the places I want to go.
	Yeah, tell me what you think of this.
	Now, I've only thought about this recently.
	I think when atheists call the religious dogmatic, what they truly mean is that you're pantheistic for low-level gods.
	What I mean is, what you've outlined is something like this.
	So let's say you have a hierarchy and hopefully it's monotheistic in the sense that you're integrated, which no one is.
	But hopefully you're pointing to one God, one source of good.
	Okay, then you're like, well, what makes me good?
	And you keep going down and down and down until you get to extremely micro-level actions.
	Such as, type this email.
	I'm typing this email.
	Why?
	So that I can get an approval for someone for an interview.
	Why?
	So that I can talk and hopefully so on and so on and so on.
	And I think you've outlined, I'm pretty sure it was you, that it depends on which level there's the disruption that is proportional to the anxiety that you experience.
	Okay.
	Exactly right.
	I think we know the neurophysiology of that even.
	Okay, so then, when someone like Sam Harris calls someone else dogmatic, essentially what they mean is that, why are you getting upset at this level?
	Why are you holding this to be sacred?
	So here's another example.
	To people who are fundamental in their religious views, so they believe it's literal, what's in the Bible is literal.
	Something I think about is, and even people who think the Bible is entirely metaphorical, If I say, well, what if...
	Let's imagine I'm speaking to a fundamentalist.
	If I say, what if this aspect of the Bible is not meant to be literal, it's metaphorical?
	They get upset.
	Why do you get upset?
	Why is your belief in God contingent?
	Should your belief in God be contingent?
	Or should you have faith no matter what?
	Okay, so then they would say, well, so why does that undermine your belief?
	To me, faith should be, well, it shouldn't be so easily undermined.
	And so, in some sense, it's as if they're saying, here is my God, instead of at the top level.
	Well, here, what?
	Oh, yeah, they are.
	Well, here, okay, well, so let's dig into that a little bit.
	That's a very good observation.
	Well, one of their unrecognized gods is literal.
	The phrase itself, because literal means real, and it means ultimately real.
	But literal doesn't mean real or ultimately real, necessarily.
	Like, literal is really, like, what does a Dostoevsky novel literally mean?
	Well, nothing.
	Well, none of it's true.
	It didn't happen.
	Or did it?
	Or did it really happen?
	Like at a meta level.
	Well, that's where great novels happen, is at a meta level.
	So truth is complicated.
	And this is, see, so the fundamentalists, they're tripped up philosophically to some degree because they can't see how something can be, oh my God, it's so complicated.
	This is where Sam Harris and I kept going off on, you know, different tangents.
	They don't know what they mean when they say literal.
	They equate literal with real.
	They equate real with material real.
	And so when you go after that and you say, well, it's not literally true, what you're essentially saying is that your whole belief system is predicated on a misapprehension, even about the nature of God, let's say.
	I mean, you know, most religious traditions, many religious traditions insist that representing God in a concrete manner is actually an error.
	The Taoists are not very happy with that idea.
	The Muslims certainly aren't.
	The Orthodox Christians really don't, many of them really don't like to represent God the Father in their iconography.
	And part of the reason for that is that...
	You shouldn't concretize the absolute.
	It's dangerous.
	Now, it's a problem, because if you don't concretize it, you can't act it out.
	So there's a tension.
	But, you know, when people say, people ask me if I believe in God, and I always think, well, there's a whole bunch of assumptions in that question that you want me to swallow so that you can categorize my answer according to your preexistent schemas, and that isn't an answer they like.
	But it's an equation, right?
	Is God real?
	God real?
	Well, what do you mean by real?
	Well, you know what I mean.
	No, I don't.
	Do you mean real like a table?
	Yeah, I don't think they know what they mean by real.
	They don't know.
	They just think they know.
	It's just like the helicopter issue.
	It's like, do you mean the table you know?
	Do you mean your table?
	Do you mean tables in general as real?
	Do they have to have four legs?
	Do they have to have a hard top?
	No.
	Like, what are we talking about when we mean real?
	Do we mean objectively real, like a table?
	Well, God isn't like a table.
	Well, then he isn't real.
	It's like, okay, well, have it your way, if that's as far as your thinking goes.
	But I don't even think that sophisticated religious people, whether they know it or not, don't think that God is real like a table.
	And as you already pointed out with your discussion about your cup, Even what exactly constitutes a table is subject to great...
	It's not obvious.
	Look, one of the most impressive thinkers I ever encountered in the field of perception wrote this book called An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
	And he would say that a table is a...
	I always forget his name.
	It's an ecological approach to visual perception.
	Gibson!
	Yes, yes.
	Okay, so when you see a table, do you see a flat surface with four legs?
	Or do you see a sitting down to eat place?
	And the answer is, you see a sitting-down-to-eat place, and there are objects that slot into that category.
	That's the answer.
	It's not the other way around.
	You don't see the material object, which is self-evident, and infer the function.
	Now, it may be a combination of those two things as well, but it doesn't matter.
	The functional element of it has a certain perceptual primacy.
	And I'll give you kind of a nifty example of this.
	There is a neurological condition called utilization behavior which accompanies prefrontal damage.
	And if someone has manifest utilization behavior, if you give them an object, they can't not use it.
	So, because what's happened is, when they see a cup, they'll lift it up and drink from it.
	Because a cup is a lifting up and drinking thing, perceptually.
	It grips their motor output.
	They can't inhibit it.
	But the fact that they have to inhibit it shows how low level the functional perception is.
	Right?
	And so, and that's part of what I was trying to lay out with Harris, is that, you know...
	The idea that the most real is the objective doesn't seem to be true for our perceptions.
	And then that tangles us up scientifically, right?
	Because if our perceptions evolved, and we evolved to adapt to reality, and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality, then what does that say about reality?
	And the answer to that question is not bloody obvious.
	Well, that's another question I hope that I can get to with Dawkins, you know.
	And maybe he knows something that I don't.
	God, I hope so.
	Yeah.
	See, I want to make the claim that it sounds then...
	And I believe you've made this claim, perhaps even Viveki, that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily, the most quote-unquote real it is.
	However, however, then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out.
	And then the closer we are to that, the closer our map is to that reality.
	Of course, we're not trying to mistake the map and the territory.
	Well, whether or not material objects exist, patterns exist.
	Right?
	And it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are.
	Like it looks to me, and you can talk about archetypes in this wise, I would say to some degree, trees have been around a long time and the tree structure is pretty embedded in our perceptual systems.
	And so there is a relationship between how long something has been around in our environment and how deep that is within our perceptual structures.
	We assume a difference between up and down, for example.
	That's really built into us, and it's at the basis of a lot of our metaphors.
	Up is high, up is the sky, up is elevated, up is the mountaintop, up is the sage, up is God.
	Well, that's partly because we're up and down creatures because there's gravity and there's the ground and we're stuck to the ground and the ground is base and it's material and it's dirty and the sky is pure and etc, etc.
	A lot of our metaphorical architecture is predicated on these underlying presumptions and they do have a depth and that's also partly why the biological question in relationship to ethics becomes complex too because...
	Some of these adaptations to permanent patterns are biological fundamentals, right?
	And so, and if utilization is part of that, then evolution, oh God, what do you say?
	Persistent patterns that we've encountered over our evolutionary history have shaped the axioms of our ethics, right?
	It's complicated, man, like all this stuff is.
	Okay, so where I was going, well, you said quite a significant amount.
	Let me see.
	Okay, so I'll just go down one route.
	I don't know if you're aware of Donald Hoffman.
	The name doesn't ring a bell.
	Okay, so Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who makes the claim that what we see is not reality.
	It almost certainly cannot be.
	And the reason is that the amount of ways that reality could be versus the amount of ways you could perceive, there's a...
	So let's say the amount of ways reality could be is at the bottom and then you have on the numerator the amount of ways that you perceive, that tends to zero.
	For anything that's even remotely complicated, which we are more than remotely complicated.
	Well, look, you've watched The Simpsons or South Park.
	South Park's even a better example.
	Well, it's barely animation at all, South Park.
	You know, it's just icons moving.
	You don't care.
	That's good enough.
	And it doesn't matter that, in fact, it's kind of an interesting style and it doesn't clutter up the story, right?
	And so what you see is an icon.
	Now, look, If you see an icon and the pixels in the icon are random samples of the underlying reality, then, and the reality doesn't change during the act of perception, then you're still seeing reality, but you're seeing it at very low resolution.
	And I think that's a better way of thinking about it.
	It's low resolution.
	It's not not real.
	And you actually don't want your representations to be any higher resolution than necessary.
	So imagine on a computer, sometimes you want a thumbnail, because that's good enough.
	And sometimes you want a high resolution photo, because you need detail.
	And that's a really good way of thinking about our perceptions.
	They're low, and then also our heuristics.
	So I think that each of us has a complete map of the world.
	Now, you might say, well, we can't because we're ignorant and the world's real complicated.
	It's like, yeah, but we just cover up what we don't perceive in detail with a low-resolution map.
	And so, things we haven't delved into in detail are mapped in a very low-resolution way, and that's good enough as long as when we use the representation we don't encounter an error.
	Like, so it works.
	And if it doesn't work, well, then you have to decompose the You have an explanation for, in some sense, a representation of everything.
	It's just low resolution.
	Like, think of the word sky.
	Okay, that's an icon.
	The word is an icon.
	So you could think the word is a representation of an image of a representation of reality.
	So when you look at the sky, you don't see the sky.
	Like, let's say you're looking up in the night sky.
	I mean, God alive, there's a hundred billion galaxies up there.
	You don't see them.
	You see a low-res representation, and then you make that even lower-res by saying sky.
	Well, is that good enough?
	Well, it's good enough if you don't get hit by a meteor when you're out there on the deck, standing, looking up at the sky, because it does the trick for the time.
	That's a pragmatic approach to truth, to some degree.
	You know, it works well enough for your current purposes.
	Complete enough for you to act in the manner that produces the result you want, not the result you predict, the one you actually want.
	It doesn't always occur like that.
	Yeah, it's not.
	No, well, of course not, because it's partly because our low-res reps, our representations are fallible, immensely fallible, but often they're good enough.
	You know, when you were speaking to Harris, what I thought was underlying the disagreement between you two, and even with you and Brett Weinstein about truth, is that there's the implicit assumption that one should pursue truth.
	So I don't know if that's the case, but when you're referring to truth and you're saying, well, here's the definition of truth, and if we were to just follow blindly scientific truth, we would build atom bombs, which we have.
	We could destroy us.
	There are many paths that can go that aren't salutary, so we should pick.
	And Brett was saying, well, one is explanatory.
	Well, who cares about explanatory?
	We care about our life.
	To me, what was underneath it was that we should pursue truth.
	Is that, am I correct in my assessment, or was there something else?
	So what if one made the claim that we don't always have to pursue truth?
	Well, we can't pursue it everywhere, right?
	There has to be a spirit that animates the pursuit of truth.
	To give it some direction.
	Well, look, here's an example.
	I think I probably used this in my discussions with Harris.
	I read this book once about biological warfare research in the Soviet Union, and it's pretty damn relevant in the case of Wuhan, let's say, you know, and God only knows what happened there, but in any case...
	Demonetized right now.
	There were Soviet scientists working on combining, trying to make a hybrid between smallpox and Ebola.
	What's that?
	Ebola!
	Right, right, right, right.
	And then to make it deliverable in aerosols.
	Well, how about maybe not?
	How about maybe we don't go there?
	You know?
	And scientists are making decisions like that all the time, because there's an infinite number of facts to study.
	See, this is the problem with the pure science argument, follow the science.
	It's like, well, there's an infinite number of facts, right?
	This is a problem.
	So science is all about the facts.
	Yeah?
	Which facts?
	And then that gets us into the postmodernist dilemma because the postmodernists say only those facts that serve the will to power and your particular will to power.
	That's just very cynical way of looking at science.
	So But there's still the question there, right?
	Something is directing this, and something needs to be directing this.
	And I would think Harrison Weinstein and myself would all agree that the pursuit of truth is of exceptional importance.
	And also that there are methods for distinguishing, let's say, material facts, scientific facts, from ethical facts.
	Now that's where it gets trickier, and the relationship between those two.
	I don't think you can look at the facts except through an ethical framework I don't think it's possible the ethical framework is built into your perception You can't help it.
	And the reason for that, it's technically quite straightforward, I believe, is that we are fundamentally ambulatory and goal-directed creatures.
	We walk, we move.
	We're always moving from point A to point B. Always.
	No matter what, even when we're looking at something, it's in preparation for a movement to somewhere better.
	You know, unless we're trying actively to make things worse, but that's an exceptional case.
	We can't help but look at the world.
	What we see is a map.
	That's a good way of thinking about it.
	We don't see the world.
	We see our map of the world.
	And we need a map because we have to walk through the world.
	And we don't want to have things fall on us, etc.
	We don't want to get lost.
	And so, and then we might infer objects from the contents of our maps.
	And we might even say those objects are fundamentally real.
	But then, you know, that's a problem because the question then arises, well, what do you mean by real exactly?
	And exactly why?
	And you know, then Sam would say, well, you can derive what's real from science.
	And I would say, well, there's an infinite number of facts, Sam.
	How the hell do we decide which facts to pursue and which not to pursue and which we shouldn't pursue?
	And you think, here's something interesting about the scientific literature.
	You write a research report about your experiment.
	You almost never tell the truth about why you got interested in that.
	What you do is you lay out this rational argument that led to your hypothesis, which isn't what led to your hypothesis at all, by the way.
	It's just a summary statement that other people could follow.
	It's not an actual description of what happened.
	You're interested in something for some reason, and that shapes your hypothesis and the direction of your research, and that's tied in with your own personal narrative.
	So, it bedevils the scientific enterprise, and it can be a real problem, because your own narrative can, you know, cloud your judgment of the, let's say, the relevant fact.
	So...
	The epitome of that is this mathematician named Ramanujan.
	Have you heard of Ramanujan?
	Yes.
	Okay, for those who haven't heard of him, he would come up through intuition or through what he would say would be dream encounters with gods or goddesses.
	He would come up with what are astounding formulas that I remember, I think it was Hardy, who was his supervisor, said, you can't simply make these up.
	They're too baroque for you to make them up.
	And they turned out to be correct.
	And what you're saying is, well, okay, how do you justify that?
	Well, that was one of the problems with him.
	What he would, is that he would spit out these formulas, which in the end, most of the time turned out to be true, slight modifications of what's true.
	And I'll give an example, if someone wants to, if someone can keep this in their head.
	Okay, so how many ways can you partition a certain number?
	So let's say 26 can be written as 1 plus 1 plus 26 times.
	Or it can be written as one plus two and then plus one one one.
	So there are many, many different partitions of a natural number.
	He came up with this formula that the number, the partitions of any number is something like one over two pi square root six.
	Then you take the derivative of what's happening here, which is exponential one over two pi over a square root of six.
	Square root of n minus 1 over 24, all over square root of n minus 1 over 24.
	And he couldn't...
	Now, I'm not sure about that particular one.
	It doesn't matter.
	This is an example.
	He couldn't prove them.
	And he would say that they just occurred to him.
	So that to me is...
	Well, I'm wondering...
	Well, that's a mystery.
	There's no one else in mathematics that was like that.
	And I'm not sure if that's because he was terribly open.
	You mentioned openness is a trait that allows you to have these large leaps of insight.
	I'm not sure if that's exactly why it could be, but that's an example.
	Yeah, well, you know, the depths of what inspires us, that's a great mystery, right?
	I mean, one of the mysteries of the scientific enterprise, for example, is hypothesis generation.
	You know, when we train graduate students, we spend a lot of time training them in method, let's say, and approach, and in writing scientific papers and so on, but there's almost no strict...
	Pedagogy in relationship to hypothesis generation.
	Well, where do you come up with your research questions to begin with?
	Well, I'm interested in that.
	It's like, well, that's really not much of an answer.
	It's certainly not formalized very well.
	What is that interest exactly?
	And how does it guide you exactly?
	And...
	What is that?
	And then you might say, well, and also, how is that related to your morality?
	Like, to what degree is your scientific curiosity motivated by your own personal desire for success?
	Or maybe the desire to serve others, you know, on the virtuous side, etc., etc.
	Well, that's just, that's just often the domain of, well, we don't ask those questions when we're scientists.
	And fair enough in some sense, but not really, because, well, you do run into the kind of problems you just described.
	You know, I work with this carver.
	He's a member of a Native Canadian tribe.
	No, it's Charles Joseph is his name.
	And he's quite a remarkable person.
	And he carves these traditional West Coast Native Canadian Quackawack sculptures.
	And he dreams in those images.
	And he consults with the spirits of his father and grandfather, great-grandfather in particular, in his dreams about his carvings.
	And he doesn't talk about that with anyone because they think he's crazy, but he's not.
	He's definitely not.
	And he's a great artist, in my estimation, unbelievably creative.
	And his creative process is so unique that, well, it's remarkable to listen to him.
	And he's the inheritor of an unbroken tradition that stems back perhaps 15,000 years.
	Yeah, you brought that up to Krauss.
	Well, you said science is nested within what you would consider to be the religious domain.
	And you could give an example by motivation.
	What motivates you to pursue a certain direction?
	So sure, once you've gotten to that direction, it's then a scientific...
	And then he said, well, look, can you point to me?
	Any fact, let's say, that the religious has come up with.
	Something like that, he said.
	Or knowledge.
	And then the question was, well, what does one mean by knowledge?
	To me, it's a soulless way of looking at the world.
	They devoid the world of soul to begin with, and then wonder, where's the soul?
	So it's like you've watched someone.
	Right now, if I go there and I open up the fridge, And I say to you, or you say, hey, Kurt had some soul that made him get up and go to the fridge.
	And then they say, well, what pixel?
	Where was that soul?
	At what point, when his fingers touched the fridge, did the soul come in?
	Well, the soul was behind that.
	Sure, at the lowest level, it wasn't.
	But the soul is somewhere at the top.
	Well, what is the soul?
	Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that there's no spirit in science, in some sense, because we chased it out when we developed the scientific methodology, right?
	And there may be an equivalent there.
	It is a related problem.
	I'm going to talk to Penrose, by the way, also, when I go to Oxford.
	Oh, wonderful.
	And about that, because Penrose thinks that consciousness is not computational, and I don't understand why he thinks that.
	I mean, I'm talking to computer engineers who are building AI brains, fundamentally, and they're quite convinced that...
	Hey, go right ahead.
	Sure, sure, sure.
	So I've studied Penrose and spoken to his partner, Stuart Hameroff, on the podcast.
	So the reason Penrose fundamentally thinks that it's not computational is because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
	The fact that it's computational in some sense, that means it's a first-order language.
	Now, because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, we can generate a proposition that we see as true, but the first-order language cannot see that it's true.
	And this can happen over and over.
	Oh, so they actually accept that interpretation of Goodell's incompleteness theorem?
	Because I proposed that in my book, Maps of Meaning, and a number of philosophical critics have said that I misunderstood that incompleteness theorem and that it didn't have any application in the domain of philosophical inquiry.
	But I thought it was also an argument about first principles, that any internally coherent system had to be predicated on axioms that weren't provable from within the confines of the system.
	And so that's part of Penrose's issue here, is it?
	It's the first principle issue.
	Yeah, now I'm unsure exactly what you said in maps of meaning that would make a philosopher raise alarm.
	Well, they just said it was inappropriate of me to, first of all, that I misunderstood Goodell's incompleteness theorem, which I might have because I'm not a mathematician, but that even if I did understand it, it wasn't appropriate to apply it to, like, systems of philosophical inquiry outside the strict domain of mathematics.
	And That was their criticism.
	And I've always been subtle leery about that because I was kind of outside my domain of expertise when I incorporated that argument.
	But it did look to me like it was a statement.
	I think what Goodell meant was that you can't have a system of usable thought in some sense that isn't predicated on axioms that stand outside the system.
	Uh-huh.
	Uh-huh.
	See, I recall reading an article of yours about a year, two years, maybe even three years ago, about Gödel's incompleteness theorem and God.
	How Gödel's incompleteness theorem, in some sense, proves God.
	And then when I was searching for it again, I couldn't find it.
	Do you recall writing an article about that?
	I don't think...
	No, no, I don't think I made that argument.
	So...
	But I could ask Penrose about that.
	Well, the question if that interpretation is correct, and if this is the issue that Penrose is trying to solve, I'd be very interested in that.
	So thank you for that, because I'll ask him.
	But the fact that there have to...
	See, I think there have to be axioms outside the system, say the propositional system, because something has to fill in the gaps...
	That our ignorance leaves.
	Because we have to map the world, but we can't because we're ignorant.
	And so what do we do?
	Well, we have assumptions.
	And even our perceptions are assumptions.
	You know, for example, I'm watching you and I'm acting as if what you're doing is telling me the truth.
	But that's an assumption.
	Now, it could be a generous assumption, it could be a necessary assumption, but there are going to be times when that assumption, which is a perceptual act, because I see you that way, right, in the broader sense of seeing, there's going to be times when that's wrong, because I'm talking to someone who isn't telling me the truth because they don't know what they're talking about, let's say, that's ignorance, or maybe they're being malevolent.
	So we fill in the gaps between our propositional knowledge and the infinitely complex world with presumptions.
	And a lot of those presumptions are perceptions.
	So I think of perceptions as the axioms of propositional thought.
	That's part of it.
	Because thought is about something, right?
	Yeah, Penrose would come from...
	Maybe it's adjacent, but an alternate route that is about understanding.
	The fact that we can understand a statement to be true, and it came from a first-order language, but that first-order language cannot see that it's true, that we understand it, implies that what we're doing is not computational.
	And the reason is that, let's imagine we could find the computational See, there's a guy named Steven Wolfram who believes that what underlies reality is something like hypergraphs and then there's a system of rewriting.
	Now, that's akin to a first order language.
	However, there would be, let's imagine that's the case at the, at the fundamental of physics is something like a rule generation process.
	That's like a first order language.
	Well, then we can find a rule, sorry, we can find a statement that this rule cannot see as being true, but then we see it as true.
	So how is it that we could be generated by this?
	If we're embedded in the first order language, how is it that we can see what...
	How is it that we can understand that to be true when we're generated by it?
	Okay, so let me...
	Okay, so that was part of the reason that Jung hypothesized the existence of a transcendent self.
	So imagine that as you go through the different manifestations of your personality in your life, you know, you say, I radically changed at some point.
	You look at retrospectively and you say, I radically changed.
	Well, imagine that there's these map systems that you identify with.
	You say, that's me.
	Your ego identifies with them.
	You say, that's me.
	But then that changes radically.
	And maybe you fall into chaos when it changes because you lose your belief.
	And then a new belief emerges out.
	Well, it emerges out of something underneath.
	What the self was, was the thing that remained constant across transformations and actually guided them in some sense.
	Now, Jung also believed that Christ, technically speaking, psychologically speaking, was a symbol of the self.
	And that's partly why the death and redemption idea rings true with us because we all go through partial deaths and descents into, sometimes into hell, you know, when everything falls apart around you.
	You know, to think about that as a descent into hell is a perfectly reasonable metaphorical statement.
	It certainly feels like an eternity when you're there.
	And in some sense, that domain has always existed right across the span of humanity, and it's a place you can go.
	It's also a place that deceit is very likely to take you, because it makes your...
	Presumption systems very fragile and much more likely to degenerate into a chaotic hell.
	In any case, the self is the thing that's underneath that that remains constant, but also the thing that guides those transformations.
	And even more importantly, in some sense, it's the thing that gives us the intuitions that guides those transformations towards a higher order form of unity and completion.
	And then you could say maybe that we're manifesting, you and I are trying to manifest that spirit in this dialogue because we're trying to modify each other's proximal constructions to move them towards a more accurate and valid position, and that we're very engaged when that's happening because it's so vital.
	You know, we go away and we think, that was a good conversation.
	That was a deep conversation.
	We really got somewhere.
	Something like that.
	That metaphor.
	We can't simply use engagement as a barometer or as a marker of following this value system because some people can be engaged heavily so when murdering people.
	Yeah, well, one of the things I would...
	One of the things I warn people about in Maps of Meaning was, if you lie enough...
	You will warp the implicit structures that guide your interest, and then you won't be able to rely on it, and then you're lost.
	Because imagine if you couldn't rely on your instinct for meaning because you'd corrupted it.
	What are you going to do?
	I think that's the sin against the Holy Ghost, you know, fundamentally.
	You can't recover from that.
	You're speaking my language.
	I'm liking what you're saying.
	It reminds me of, it's like we have a compass.
	And every time, every lie is a disequilibrium.
	It makes it not operate properly.
	And so that's one reason to not tell a lie.
	And what's interesting, though, is that if you've corrupted your compass, and your compass should hopefully lead you somewhere positive, and that depends on if you're aiming positively, Then telling the truth recalibrates it.
	Yes.
	Well, look, psychotherapy, I kind of developed this idea when I went down.
	I did my first public talk at Pucknell University about a month ago, and one of the things that I've been writing about is that the psychotherapeutic presumption...
	So the first presumption is that there is such a thing as psychotherapy.
	The second presumption is that it can lead you to a state of increased psychophysiological well-being and health.
	Wait, why is that first assumption necessary?
	What do you mean that there is such a thing as psychotherapy?
	Well, you could just say that it's just rubbish.
	I mean, when Freud first came out and said, well, talking can cure people, you know, that was a pretty preposterous claim.
	No one believed it.
	How can just talking, you know, heal?
	It's like, well, talking is thinking.
	You don't think thinking has anything to do with your psychophysiology?
	And what Freud did was have people just talk.
	They could say anything.
	He didn't even, like, that's why they laid on the couch and didn't see him.
	It was like, say anything that comes into your mind.
	Okay, so, well, essentially what you're doing is telling the truth to yourself in an untrammeled manner.
	Now, people think by talking.
	Most people think by talking.
	You have to be a pretty good thinker before you can think without having to talk.
	Really, what you have to do is talk to yourself in your head.
	You have the revelatory part of thought, which is your ideas, and then you engage in dialectical criticism internally.
	It's an internalized conversation.
	And you have to be pretty sophisticated to be really good at that.
	You have to be willing to divide yourself into at least two parts and you have to be able to do that.
	Most people do that by talking.
	So they reveal what they think to themselves by talking.
	And then having said what they say, they can, you know, take it or leave it.
	Then they start to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff.
	And that can be, is psychotherapeutically curative.
	And certainly people like Carl Rogers placed a tremendous emphasis on both truth as the curative process in psychotherapy, but also the necessity for the psychotherapist, him or herself...
	To essentially act out something like the role of Christ.
	Rogers was extremely influenced by Protestant thinking.
	I mean, he was going to evangelize the world when he was a kid, but he became agnostic or atheistic, but it all stuck.
	So the idea was, if I listen to you in the right spirit, You can reveal truths to yourself that will reconstitute you and redeem you.
	That's basically the whole premise of psychotherapy.
	And it works, you know.
	And mostly what I saw in psychotherapy, I practiced for 20 years, was we just got rid of a fair bit of ignorance.
	We did a fair bit of social skills development.
	Like, I taught a lot of people how to shake hands and say hello and introduce themselves, because they just didn't have those skills.
	But a lot of it was, let's find out the lies, man, and get rid of them.
	And it's up to you to figure out what the lies are.
	Oh, listen, I'm not telling you.
	I don't know what your lies are.
	I don't know what lies you're tangled up in.
	I don't want to presume.
	Yeah.
	And I know some people who would lie to their therapist because they're too ashamed or for whatever reason.
	And some people ask me, what am I advocating for with this film, Blue, Better Left Unsaid?
	And for me, I'm not advocating for anything.
	I'm not like, well, be presumptuous for me to advocate.
	It would mean that I found something that I'm trying to convince other people of.
	Truly better left unsaid was like an attempt for me to cohere and solidify my own thoughts, develop them.
	So what did it teach you?
	Well, Tommy, that's simply not easy.
	And you'll notice that I pause, I tend to pause before I think.
	And one of the reasons is that it's...
	Firstly, I'm trying to...
	If it's something that I've said before, I try to say it in a different manner.
	And I'll give...
	Well, one reason, even if it's synonyms, even if I'm simply replacing the words with synonyms, and the reason is that, well, first, it's great for cognitive flexibility.
	I think words are like patons.
	They allow you to reach farther places.
	Like when you're rock climbing, they're like patons.
	But secondly, because even if it's something that is the same phenomenon, when you view it from a slightly different angle, you get a better understanding of what it is.
	Earlier we were talking about idolatry, and I think it's almost idolatry as akin to mistaking the representation for what's trying to be represented.
	So imagine this, imagine that you have a column.
	And then insisting that that, yeah, and insisting that that representation is in fact the totality.
	Yeah.
	Which means insisting that your interpretation is the totality, right?
	The satanic error.
	My interpretation is the totality.
	It's like, oh really, is it?
	Hmm, good luck with that.
	I'm super excited to talk to you about the definitions of God and we'll get to that at some point.
	So it would be like, imagine if you have an upside down ice cream cone.
	So it looks like this.
	I did not expect you to say that.
	All right.
	If you look at it from the bottom, it's a circle.
	If you look at it from the top, it's also a circle.
	If you look at it from the side, it's a triangle.
	If you look at it from, let's say, over here or over here, it looks like a teardrop.
	And so people, when they're describing God, what I think they're trying to do is it's an extremely...
	It may be the most complicated...
	People say the brain is the most complicated.
	Perhaps God is.
	Perhaps it's one of the definitions of God, but maybe it's not that...
	Either way, God is complicated.
	And so to say that, well, if you look across religions, it's contradictory.
	Therefore, what's being described can't exist, or only one of them can be correct.
	Perhaps...
	Now, I'm not ecumenical enough to say they're all correct in their own manner.
	I'm not under a tree meditating with flowers saying that everyone's correct, though that may actually be the case.
	I'm saying that just because something is contradictory doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore it.
	It may be akin to different perspectives on the same object.
	I don't know if you've heard of M-theory.
	It's a form of string theory.
	String theory says this because there are five different flavors.
	There's type 2A, 2B, and so on.
	And it's actually posited that they're all Not adumbrations of the same phenomenon, but actually different perspectives of the same phenomenon.
	This is obvious for people to understand where the old refrain of you touching an elephant's ear, touching an elephant's tail, touching an elephant, and they're all described.
	Okay, so this is obvious to some people.
	I'm wondering if, well, I'm not wondering, I have a I have a distinct feeling the different descriptions of God.
	Even there's so many contradictory statements between the East and the West about God.
	So the East, look, there's suffering in life.
	There's also extreme grace and love in life too.
	But one of the One of the solutions is act right.
	So don't lie.
	And then let's say that's the West's answer.
	Then the other answer is to realize that the suffering is illusory.
	So to do away with the coin.
	So one is that the coin, look, there's a good side and a bad side.
	So choose the good.
	That's the West.
	And the East would say, well, realize that there is no coin.
	And that's another solution.
	And perhaps somehow they're the same solution.
	I've heard you talk about stumbling uphill and what lies at the top of the hill is maximal responsibility.
	Is it?
	Is that all that lies at the top of the hill?
	Or is it also warmth and forgiveness and grace?
	And are those the same?
	Okay, how are those the same?
	Okay, let's think about this.
	Yeah, I think, well, the responsibility in some sense is to lift that load up the hill.
	You know, that doesn't mean that it's responsibility that's at the top of the hill.
	Ah, okay.
	In the West, I mean, in some ways, Christ is represented as taking the responsibility for all the sins of mankind unto himself, right?
	Well, that's responsibility.
	And look, to the degree that each of us are trying to sort out in our own souls complex problems that bedevil other people, we're doing that in a low resolution form, right?
	We're taking the fragility and errors and malevolence of mankind onto ourselves and trying to sort that out.
	And that's meaningful, although it's also extremely burdensome.
	And, you know, it can kill you, it can crush you.
	And so the responsibility has to be tempered in a variety of ways to make it even bearable.
	You know, one of the things that's so interesting about the Christian story, in my estimation, is that that responsibility is so overwhelming that, you know, it was even daunting for God himself.
	So, that's built into the story, and that's certainly worth thinking about.
	You know, what's at the top?
	Well, we can hit at it.
	Jung talked about that process that you described of viewing something from multiple different perspectives.
	He technically called that circumambulation.
	Walking around.
	And it was the attempt to, yeah, exactly, to view something very complicated, like take snapshots of it from a whole bunch of different perspectives.
	And this is partly why very rationally minded people who like to walk through something logically find Jung hard to...
	Well, tolerate even, because that isn't how he thinks.
	He thinks in this circumambulatory manner.
	Well, think of it this way, and think of it this way, and here is another viewpoint, and this, and so forth.
	And then you read that, it's like having an Impressionist painting cohere in your mind into a whole.
	It's like all of a sudden you go, whap!
	Oh, I see what he's talking about.
	And that's an overwhelming experience.
	I mean, I really experienced that reading Ion, which is a, It's an unbelievably terrifying book, and it's so brilliant.
	It hasn't been unpacked at all into our culture.
	It's terrifying because...
	Well, Jung is the only thinker I've ever seen who, you know, we hypothesized earlier in some sense that that artistic intuition lays out the map for the development of propositional thinking.
	Well, Jung traced the development of that intuitive pattern-seeking imagination back like 3,000 years.
	That's partly why he talks about astrology.
	So...
	When we looked up in the night sky, let's see, prior to the development of astronomy, what we saw, we didn't know what we were looking at, right?
	It filled us with awe, but we didn't know what we were looking at, so we populated the sky with figures of our imagination.
	That's the constellations, and it was a way of orienting ourselves.
	So if you look at astrology...
	Psychologically, what you have is a vast storehouse of the contents of the human imagination.
	Now, in astrology, there was the idea of a certain kind of progression through the eons.
	Well, Jung believed that the fantasy that underlined astrology was so deep that it had sketched out the map for the trail that we're actually walking down.
	I don't understand that.
	Well, the artists have intuitions about what's coming.
	So they're the first people in the unexplored territory.
	And then the more propositional philosophers and such, and the scientists, they fill in the details.
	But the trailblazing has already been done by the imaginative and the intuitive.
	Right.
	And so Jung, in Eye on Jung...
	Sorry, continue.
	In Eye on Jung tracks...
	Well, that's okay.
	In Eye on Jung tracks the contents of that imagination back...
	Several thousand years and also lays out something like a scheme for the future.
	So, for example, he believed that this is so strange, man.
	He believed that the idea that there were wise men who saw a star that signified Christ's birth was actually a reference to the astrological idea that something new would be born at the dawn of the age of Pisces.
	How does that get to one star?
	Well, because they were interpreters of the stars.
	So, Pisces is a constellation that's characterized by a fish going in one direction and a fish going in the other.
	Jung was very interested in the use of fish symbolism in Christianity.
	He associated that with the astrological imagination.
	He also believed that the 2,000-year period from Christ's birth roughly to now was characterized by two ions, one which was explicitly Christian, that's the fish moving in one direction, and the other, which led to the development of empirical science, was an antithesis.
	And that that had been foreshadowed by this symbolism which was part of the intuitive discovery of that which was yet to come.
	That's only part of the argument.
	It's an unbelievably profound book.
	And it's terrifying once you understand what he's talking about.
	And I've never seen anyone criticize it who actually understood it.
	Almost all the criticisms I've seen of Jung and his thinking, it's like, no, you're not hitting the target there, buddy.
	He's asking questions that you don't even know need to be asked.
	So, you're not in the ballgame.
	So, in any case...
	The more scientific-minded people...
	Yeah, well, the more propositionally-minded people.
	See, Jung had a problem with the propositional universe.
	He said, yeah, well, there's a gap between what we know and the unknown per se.
	Well, what fills that gap?
	Well, dreams.
	Dreams.
	The imagination.
	Yeah.
	Imagery.
	It's at the boundary of propositional thought, and it's between us and what we absolutely don't know.
	And the visionary artists operate in the domain of imagination and pave the path for the propositional types.
	And think about the relationship, say, between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
	Nietzsche was much more propositional than Dostoevsky.
	But Dostoevsky fundamentally is deeper.
	Now, he's not as clear, right?
	That's the trade-off.
	Everything in Nietzsche is in Dostoevsky, and Moore is in Dostoevsky.
	And Nietzsche himself knew that.
	I mean, he was no piker when it came to appreciation, let's say, of works of the imagination.
	But that's a good way of thinking.
	And you see this too.
	I saw this great lecture by Jonathan Pazzo, which I'm going to put up on my YouTube channel, where he spent about 20 minutes explaining the meaning of an orthodox icon that showed A serpent.
	I don't want to get into it.
	It's too complicated.
	But there's so much in that image, you just can't believe it.
	And you think, well, how did it all get there?
	And it's akin to the question you asked about the mathematician.
	It's like, who has plumbed the depths of the human soul?
	No one.
	Where do these ideas come from?
	Well, they appear in my head.
	You think that's an explanation?
	The ideas appear in your...
	Where in your head, exactly?
	Exactly.
	What do you mean by your head?
	Do you mean physically?
	Like, what do you mean?
	Well, you don't know what you mean.
	And God only knows where ideas come from.
	To think that they just spring fully formed out of the void without a huge developmental history is naive in the extreme.
	Yeah.
	It's like, who built the Sistine Chapel?
	Was it Michelangelo?
	Not who built, who painted.
	Well, in some sense, yes.
	But also, he came from a myriad of people before him.
	And not only that, but the Bible, and also thousands and thousands of years before.
	To meet these scientists who like to...
	I'm not trying to demean scientists in any way.
	I mean, the rationally atheistic-minded scientists, and I'm strawmanning them when I'm saying that.
	So let me just pick someone.
	Krauss.
	To pick on Krauss.
	Krauss would...
	He looks at phenomenon in an extremely deathless manner.
	Now, obviously, he doesn't.
	But what I mean is, it's almost like someone who's at the top of the trees, and they're so far up that they don't realize that there's roots beneath them, that they've forgotten that there's roots, and they think that they don't need it.
	They dislike what doesn't make sense.
	Yeah, well, that's part of this.
	That's right.
	That's exactly.
	That's part of this.
	See, Krauss is a great physicist, and...
	But there's a lot of what he does that he regards as self-evident and is never questioned.
	And it's sort of a precondition for what he does as a physicist, because, you know, if you're a physicist, you're off doing physics.
	You're not questioning your presumptions, except maybe in the domain of physics.
	But a lot of what he regards as self-evident just simply isn't self-evident.
	It's not.
	And that's a real problem when it comes to discussions about what's real.
	And you brought up a couple of issues earlier that are really worth returning to.
	You know, one issue is, what is the one that unites the many?
	And you might say, well, we don't need one that unites the many.
	We can have a diverse range of values, let's say.
	Well, then you have the problem of conflict, confusion, and anxiety, plus hopelessness, because you don't really have a goal.
	It's not like that polytheism, let's say, is without a cost.
	It's fragmentary.
	And it causes social havoc because person A will pursue value A and person B will pursue value B. And that's okay if they're united under a higher order structure that unites them in some sense, but it's not okay at all.
	It's the situation in the desert when Moses is leading his people away from Egypt, right?
	Yeah.
	It's the central organizing principle was the Egyptian totalitarian state had dissolved and what happens is this descent into a fragmentation.
	And that's extremely dangerous.
	It's not the promised land, that's for sure.
	So the question is, well, what's the one that unites the many?
	That's the central religious question.
	Now, so then, and can't you say that the one that unites the many is the most real?
	Well, then you're in the domain of definition, right?
	At that point, it starts to become like a definition rather than a proposition.
	Yeah, that's why when you ask people to define, well, what is real, it just becomes tautological.
	Not that, by the way, not that tautologies are trivial.
	So, for example, there's Chris Langan.
	He has one of the highest IQs recorded, along with Savant, I believe.
	He builds his theory of everything, in some sense, from a super-tautology.
	That is, it's an apodictive formulation of existence.
	Well, that's God's definition of himself, right?
	I am that I am.
	That's God's definition of Himself in the Bible.
	Okay, man, I think we should get to the definitions of God.
	This is extremely interesting.
	So you mentioned what states constant...
	Well, we tried it to one part, right?
	Well, that's a good question.
	You know, I think it's the Spirit that guides our sequential transformations upward to a higher and higher form of unity, and maybe a higher and higher form of delight and love.
	Do you think that we're all God?
	I'm sure you've heard some people say that we're God, but we've forgotten that we're God.
	I can't answer a question like that exactly.
	I mean, I believe that the idea that we have a divine spark within is an extraordinarily beautiful, poetic, and necessary idea.
	And I think that if you act like that, to yourself and other people, that things get radically...
	Interesting.
	Interesting and deeply meaningful around you.
	And it seems to be a very good proposition to guide your actions.
	You know, because what we're hoping, you and me, maybe to the degree that we're being good, is that the spirit of truth in you is speaking to the spirit of truth in me.
	And so, and that is...
	A reflection of the presumption upon which Western civilization is based explicitly, let's say, not to say that it doesn't permeate other cultures, but it's that spirit of truth that animates us and that redeems us and our societies as well.
	And hopefully that's expressed in the quality of our speech when we're free to speak.
	And so is that divine?
	Well, Is that divine?
	Well, I don't think it's separable from thought itself, in some sense.
	It might not be separable from consciousness itself.
	Is that divine?
	Well, you know, whenever you have that, is that this?
	It's an equation, right?
	Is one plus one equal to two?
	Well, one of the answers to that is, well, each of those...
	Claims on both sides of the equation are equally dubious in relationship to one another.
	Because what you're trying to do is to say, is God real?
	Well, what you're not saying is, we know what real is, and it's this.
	And does God fit into that category?
	It's also, we know what God is, in order to assess it.
	Well, because you could reverse it and say, is real God?
	It's the same question, right?
	It's the same question.
	So here's one of...
	This is something I heard from Tyler Goldstein, who has his own theory of everything.
	He said, ordinarily, here's how it works.
	We have a definition, and then we look for evidence, and then dismiss what we've just defined if we don't find the evidence.
	He said, perhaps what we should do when it comes to God is, instead of...
	Instead of looking for God and then not finding it and then saying God doesn't exist, you use the fact that you didn't find evidence of God as an indication that you should alter your definition of God.
	Yeah, well, that's a perfectly reasonable approach to that problem.
	Right.
	Obviously, there's some...
	Yeah.
	However...
	No, that's a good...
	That's a really good observation.
	Right?
	It shows you how tricky questions like that are, right?
	It's like, well, maybe you're looking in the wrong place.
	Maybe you formulated your search incorrectly.
	Like, you don't know.
	Because let's say you're aiming at the highest reality, right?
	It's like, you're aiming at the highest reality.
	Well, how do you know you have the question formulated properly?
	Because if you did, well, you'd have already found it.
	And so you might say, well, does the highest reality exist?
	Well...
	We're back to the problem of the one that unites the many.
	Yeah, yeah.
	See, I was downtown in Toronto, and I talked to someone, and he's this Jamaican guy, so it probably won't happen now.
	It's too cold.
	He was cutting coconuts and selling it.
	And I said, hey, by the way, what's your name?
	He said, Kurt.
	I'm like, oh, my God.
	I rarely meet people whose name is Kurt, and he's from the Caribbean.
	And I walked away, and I remember thinking, oh, he has my name.
	And then I remember stopping thinking, no, no, he's much older.
	I have his name.
	Then I thought, probably what's better to say is we share the same name.
	And then I thought, ah, okay, what is it that we all share?
	And is that somehow related?
	Is that not synonymous with God?
	And what is it that we all share?
	Now, here's something else that I was thinking about.
	When we...
	Right now, we're speaking to one another in podcast form.
	So in some sense, we're copying this.
	You can think of this archetypally.
	In some sense, we're copying podcasts by doing so.
	When one is playing rock music...
	One is copying rock in some...
	Because no one speaks with a twang.
	Where do you develop that?
	You're copying something.
	Then I thought, well, how far can you take that?
	When you're doing art in general, what are you copying?
	Okay, how far can that be taken?
	How about if you're simply...
	Right, man.
	Now you're...
	That's exactly it.
	Right.
	How about if you're simply living and laying bare?
	What are you copying?
	Is by simply existing and living, is that a reflection of what you're copying is God's essence in some manner?
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	That is abstracted completely.
	Well, I don't think there's any difference.
	I don't think there's any difference between imitation and worship.
	They're the same thing.
	That's why the Eastern Orthodox types lay such emphasis on the imitation of Christ.
	Well, you should worship.
	Well, Pajot, he says, well, that means enthusiastically celebrate.
	Right?
	Raise to the highest position.
	Well, then you imitate that.
	You imitate that which is of most value.
	Right?
	You imitate, hopefully, right?
	What else would you want to do?
	Have you thought much about self-fulfilling beliefs?
	You'd have to be more specific.
	Okay, here's the reason why I say that.
	Imagine...
	Now, I believe you've outlined this too.
	We've talked plenty about maps.
	So let's imagine it's literally like a map, just for simplicity.
	You construct the world.
	So you have a worldview and it looks like a top-down view of when you're buying an apartment and you see the ground layout.
	So imagine that.
	You're constructing a worldview.
	When it comes to self-fulfilling beliefs...
	That's extremely interesting to me because it means there are parts of reality on that map that whatever you project to be there will be there.
	So let's say I think there's a toilet in there.
	You're right.
	If you don't think there's a toilet in there, there's not.
	So there are parts of your map that are always correct, no matter what you think about.
	Yeah, well, okay.
	I would turn that a little bit.
	I would say this is something Kierkegaard talked about, at least to some degree.
	Imagine that there are only things that you can find out by doing them.
	So you can't validate the hypothesis, you can't test the hypothesis without acting it out.
	So let's say you decide that you're going to tell the truth.
	Well, what evidence is there that you should do that?
	Well, who knows?
	There's evidence that you should lie.
	It works in the short term.
	It might be to your benefit in the short term.
	I mean, maybe if you deceive some girl, she'll sleep with you, you know?
	It's like, why not do that?
	Well, you can't collect the facts, you know, in some sense.
	Not in a simple manner.
	Well, let's say you decide to tell the truth as carefully as you can.
	Well, then you're going to have a certain kind of life, right?
	And you're not going to have that life unless you do that.
	And so you won't even get access to the data unless you take the steps.
	And that's partly why faith is necessary, especially in an endeavor like that.
	You have to decide at some fundamental point.
	You know, maybe you're scattered all over the place.
	It's interesting, when Christ comes back in the book of Revelation, and he's the judge, so separating the damned from the saved, let's say, he says something very strange.
	He says, if you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
	He actually says vomit.
	So it's a disgust reaction.
	And it's this idea that The worst sin is to play both sides against the middle.
	You know, that sometimes you'll lie and sometimes you'll tell the truth.
	You know, you won't commit to something because you want it both ways and that's the worst possible...
	Well, so let's say you commit to lies.
	Well, maybe you'll find out pretty quickly that that's a hell of a thing to do and learn.
	What if you don't commit?
	Sorry.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I was going to say, what if you don't commit not because you believe that you know what's...
	What's correct, and you'd like to lie, but because you simply don't know.
	Yeah, well, that's okay, man.
	Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a different, that's psychologically, that's a whole different thing, I would say.
	Well, the real damage comes when you know what you should do, and then you decide not to do it anyways.
	Yeah, you violate your conscience.
	Yes, it is the same thing.
	And if you practice that, you're going to be in hell.
	And you're probably going to drag a fair number of people along with you, if you have your druthers.
	I feel comfortable speculating, because I don't mind.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I'm so sorry that I keep interrupting you.
	Oh man, you're not.
	Don't be sorry about it.
	Okay, let me say this.
	It's fine.
	I don't know if it's true that you temporarily get what you want, per se, when you lie.
	And the reason is it depends on what you want.
	Now, obviously, everything depends on everything.
	You can always say that.
	It depends on so-and-so.
	But the reason I say that is that it's meretricious in some sense.
	You think you want object X, and then it turns out that you don't when you get it.
	So I remember in Pirates of the Caribbean, I could be misremembering this, but there is some gold.
	I think I'm completely I'm generalizing this, but let's imagine there's some gold gem that they wanted and it glows.
	And this guy's like, there's only one in the world that's unique.
	I want this.
	He eventually goes through this whole journey.
	He finds it.
	And then he says, oh, no, then he's happy until he gets to this island where there's millions.
	It just, as far as the eye can see, there are these gold gems.
	And it just stops.
	He's like, why did I go through all this for that?
	And in some sense, I'm wondering, hmm, It's the majority of religious texts telling us, you think you want so-and-so.
	What you actually want is this.
	And in that way, we can say that even the atheist, we can even say that the atheist ultimately wants God.
	Even the serial killer ultimately wants God.
	What they get is their distractions.
	I can't wander down that road with you at the moment because I'm getting tired.
	But I'd like to say one thing about that deceit issue again, and maybe we could close.
	If you lie...
	To a girl and she sleeps with you.
	Sure.
	Why aren't you a rapist?
	And is that actually what you wanted?
	Right?
	Because it's false pretenses.
	Like, if you could get away with rape.
	Yeah, well, so then all of a sudden you don't have...
	Well, maybe what you want in your soul of souls is, you know...
	The sexual encounter you'd have in paradise.
	You know, you want love.
	You want companionship.
	You want a maternal embrace.
	You want eroticism.
	You want deep personal contact.
	You want eye-to-eye communication.
	That's all part of this fantasy, you know.
	Then you deceive to get it.
	And then you get it.
	Well, no, you don't.
	Because you're a deceitful rapist.
	And so what do you get?
	Well, you get the corruption of your soul and the contamination of the thing that you want and need most desperately and that the entire human endeavor depends upon.
	And that's probably a good place to close.
	It was really good talking to you, man.
	Yeah, yeah, it was great talking to you.
	Now, man, I wanted to talk about Free Will.
	We couldn't talk much about your film.
	Sure, sure, sure.
	Okay, I wanted to...
	Or maybe we did.
	You know what I mean?
	Yes, right, exactly.
	That's another aspect we can talk about.
	How much of reality is fractal-like where...
	The examination of any element, if you pursue it far enough, is the examination of the whole.
	Now, I know Cantor believed that by studying infinity mathematically, he was studying the mind or studying God per se.
	And some people think, why are you wasting your time if you're someone who cares about the good?
	Why are you Caring about mathematics or physics or...
	Well, hey man, maybe if you're truthfully exploring something, you're trying...
	And I take question to your...
	Not question.
	I take exception to one of your rules, which is tell the truth.
	I like the codicil, which is...
	Or at least not lie.
	But I would reverse that.
	I'd say don't lie and try to tell the truth.
	Because it's much easier to feel like you're telling the truth when you're not.
	You can trick yourself.
	And I think the majority of the time we think we're telling the truth isn't.
	And that's another reason I paused because there are thoughts that come to me.
	You start by stopping lying.
	There are thoughts that occur.
	I have to compare.
	It's not easy to discern what is actually what I think and what's a reflex that just comes to me.
	So I'm trying to make sure.
	Well, anyway, we can talk about free will another time.
	It was really good talking to you, man.
	Yeah, it was great talking to you as well.
	Good luck with your continued endeavors and with your podcast.
	And I really liked your idea about not saying the same thing twice the same way.
	That's a real interesting mental habit, disciplinary habit.
	That's smart.
	What's four to the power of four?
	256.
	Okay, so how do you know that?
	You can memorize it.
	But another way is that you can go, well, what's 4 to the power of 5?
	Well, that's 2 to the power of 10.
	That's 1024 if you're a computer scientist.
	You know that because you deal with bits.
	And then you can say, well, what's 2 to the...
	So what's 4 to the power of 364?
	So you can bound it from each side.
	4 to the power of 3, 4 to the power of 5.
	And then you get a better understanding of what it means to be 4 to the power of 4.
	So the more...
	Even if it's slight alterations of saying the same phenomenon, of trying to describe the same phenomenon, you get a better understanding of it.
	And when you're talking about something so complex...
	I never give the same lecture twice.
	Yeah, and that's not easy, man.
	No, but it's pretty damn entertaining, I'll tell you.
	Yeah.
	So before we go, I'm curious, why is it that you do these podcasts?
	What are you trying to accomplish with them?
	So one is obviously you're trying to learn and obviously you've attained some level of fame and wealth.
	So it's not as if you want more, perhaps you do.
	I mean, we can't discount selfish motivations, but what is the reason that you hope the good reason in you is?
	To have conversations like this and to share them with as many people as possible in the hopes that we'll build better people and not burn the world down.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Some people say, well, why is it that I'm focusing on the left?
	And you mentioned it's not...
	See, some people from the left call the right reactionary.
	Well, so it seems like perhaps what you're doing on the extreme left, even if you feel like the right is more damaging, you don't think you're provoking the right?
	Also, the left is more amenable to reason, at least colloquially, it's more amenable to reason.
	So I thought perhaps I should pursue that.
	And I'm more interested.
	The right is blatant in the racism.
	So it's like, well, that's a five-minute film if I'm to analyze the right.
	And yeah, so I'll just...
	I'll let people know about...
	If they'd like to see more about me, they can visit Theories of Everything.
	So you can just type that into YouTube.
	There are conversations much like this, Jordan, where I'm super...
	I'm so fascinated.
	No, I wouldn't say my motivations are pure.
	I'm fascinated by consciousness, physics, free will, and God.
	And exploring them with technical depth as much as I can.
	And not despising, like most people.
	I think that disparagement is what, in many ways, is holding us back.
	So I'm trying to bring some rigor, some exactitude to it.
	Because it's not...
	That's actually...
	Well, we can talk about that.
	And then for Better Left Unsaid, if people want to see, you can go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com.
	But I try to bring some of the same analytical framework to exploring the concept of...
	No, exploring the question of when does the left go too far.
	And it's such an incomplete film.
	I disavow it in many ways because it's so incomplete.
	But it's almost like homework.
	I have to submit it at some point.
	Yep.
	Jordan, absolutely.
	Thank you, man.
	Ciao, man.
	Really good talking to you.
	It flew by, and you're very articulate and thoughtful, and you're very careful with your words, and so good for you, man.
	Yeah, well, thank you.
	That's a huge compliment coming from you.
	Good to talk to you.
	Take care, man.

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