July 23, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:59
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mullery from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| This is a quick tour through the philosophy and psychology of Inception with Leonardo to Titanic and the chick who looks hot when she's not pregnant. | |
| So, I really like the film. | |
| I think it's really, really worth going to see. | |
| I actually saw it in IMAX because I like a screen approximately the same size as my forehead. | |
| And it's really, really good to see on a big screen. | |
| Don't wait to see it on your TV. Really go, and if you can get to the IMAX version, so much the better. | |
| So what did I like about it? | |
| There's a great, great statement in the film which says, the only way forward is... | |
| I really like that. | |
| That is the commandment of Socrates from over 2,500 years ago, that the unexamined life is not worth living, that self-knowledge is the key to wisdom, and I could not agree with that statement more, and despite all of the bizarre Hoth planet, James Bond, good guys and bad guys are both wearing white, | |
| who knows what the hell's going on, shoot-em-up scenes, I thought that it was a great hymn to the power of I really liked that the unconscious was larger than the conscious world. | |
| In other words, the majority of the movie took place in the unconscious. | |
| And that's not giving anything away. | |
| That's said right up front. | |
| People always talk about the three layers of dreams. | |
| Of course there are four. The movie itself is a dream because that's what movies are. | |
| And so there really are four layers. | |
| You're in the mind of the director who's in the mind of other people three layers down. | |
| And I really liked that the unconscious was considered a larger world than the conscious mind. | |
| That is very true. We spend a huge amount of time in the unconscious. | |
| We spend a huge amount of time in dreams and daydreaming and inspiration hits us and we have all of these great things that go on. | |
| And the unconscious has a huge mega tidal pull on our everyday decision making. | |
| I say decision making sometimes in quotes. | |
| And so I really liked that the majority of the film took place in the unconscious because that's where a huge amount of our actual humanity resides. | |
| That's where a huge amount of our actual life goes on. | |
| So I thought that was great. | |
| I liked this token. | |
| There's a token so when you're in the unconscious you have something that's just for yourself. | |
| That has objective properties that nobody else knows about so that you know whether you're in the dream or not. | |
| So there's this one spinny thing that if you're in a dream, it never falls down. | |
| And if you're not in a dream, then it falls down. | |
| I really like that. | |
| I, as a philosopher, would call that token... | |
| Philosophy, which I think is a pretty accurate description. | |
| The objective physical properties of matter, this is how we know we're in dreams or we're not in dreams. | |
| You know, as the wizened old man in the Rudyard Kipling opium des says, who are you to know what is dream and what is not? | |
| I don't know if he sounds vaguely Italian, but there it is. | |
| So I really like this token that there's an objective way of knowing whether you're in a dream or not, and that, of course, I would call empirical and rational philosophy, as I constantly want to talk about. | |
| So I think that was another really interesting aspect of the film. | |
| There were some flaws for me. | |
| I thought that the conflict was pretty retarded. | |
| I mean, the fights. The fights were pretty retarded. | |
| I don't know if you've had a dream. | |
| I have dreams with conflict. | |
| I'm embattled against the world, it sometimes feels like, for the future and embattled against the present. | |
| In my dreams, conflict can be very titanic and it's never me shooting at a door at some guy up on a ledge. | |
| That to me is very prosaic. | |
| That sort of Unreal Tournament style of fighting is more appropriate to video games and James Bond films rather than The titanic and powerful conflicts that can occur within the unconscious. | |
| So I thought that was kind of ridiculous. | |
| I also thought that as they went further down in the unconscious, the conflicts were going to become more surreal, they were going to become more stylized, they were going to be, you know, like you're being attacked by a giant poppy from an impressionistic painting, because who hasn't had those dreams? | |
| And I'm naked and late for work. | |
| And I can't find the right exam room for my exam to take. | |
| So I thought that it was kind of prosaic. | |
| At the very deepest level of the unconsciousness, it's a bunch of guys in snowmobiles. | |
| It just seemed very prosaic, and I thought that they could have gone a little bit more. | |
| Who am I to say? It's a better film than I could write, but that would be one thing that I would have revisited. | |
| Were I in charge of the script? | |
| If you're going to go right down to the core of human identity, right where the unconscious blends into the spinal column and our truly animal natures, and right where the images and power and vividness and beauty and terror of dreams occurs, it just seemed kind of cheesy to be putting tripwires between trees so guys can go and, you know, fall off their snowmobiles. | |
| It just seemed kind of mundane, that level of conflict. | |
| That having been said, I really liked that the unconscious was in a dance with the conscious mind. | |
| There were two aspects of it. First, the unconscious in the movie takes note of what is going on in the outside world. | |
| As the bus is turning, the unconscious is also turning. | |
| The dreams are also turning. That didn't happen at the very bottom level, which I thought was kind of weird. | |
| The two middle levels stuff was turning, the bottom level stuff wasn't turning. | |
| No biggie, I guess you can't turn a mountain very easily. | |
| But I really liked that the unconscious takes great note of what is happening in the outside world. | |
| You get splashed in the dream, in the first level, then you get splashed in the second level. | |
| So I thought that was great, because that is what the unconscious does. | |
| The unconscious takes very careful note of what is happening in our day-to-day activities, and the first place that I look when I'm trying to figure out a dream that I've had is to look at what happened that day that provoked the dream. | |
| The unconscious is very sensitive to what's going on in the daily world. | |
| So I thought that was great. Sometimes we think of the unconscious as just a mad little prison that we stuff all of the things we're not comfortable with, like we're in charge and we get to banish them down to the Guantanamo of abandoned and rejected selfhood. | |
| That's not true. The unconscious is a very powerful and potent force in our lives and needs to be negotiated with and needs to be listened to and so on. | |
| So I thought that was really great that the unconscious took note of what was going on in the outside world. | |
| I also thought that it was really great That there was a relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. | |
| So the lead dude was constantly being messed up by this, I guess, what Jung would call the animus, his wife, his female side, and so on. | |
| She was constantly coming up to trip up his activities, which I thought was really good because the unconscious, not listened to, will snarl and trip you like a cat when you're carrying some heavy groceries. | |
| So I thought that was really great. | |
| That if you repress and if you abandon and if you reject aspects of yourself, they will sort of rise up and trip you up and oppose you, and thus a sort of calm self-awareness, self-acceptance, spontaneity, negotiation with the self is essential in order to have a healthy and happy mental life, an emotional life. So I thought that was fantastic and really enjoyable within the film. | |
| The last point I'll make... | |
| I'll keep this relatively short. | |
| It's a shock, I know. The last point that I'll make is... | |
| God. Fascinating. | |
| Anybody who has gone through therapy, who has a good degree of self-knowledge, who journals, who explores their own dreams, we all who've gone through this process, we all understand that God is a projection, right? | |
| What is God in the world is nothing. | |
| There's no God in the world. But there is a superior and powerful intelligence that sits below our consciousness called the unconscious, which processes thousands of times more information than the conscious mind can process and seems to be with us and answers questions if you ask it and provides wisdom and speaks to you in science. | |
| Everything that God What the unconscious does in the outside world, in the illusion of religion, is what the unconscious does. | |
| And so when you explore yourself, when you gain a good degree of self-knowledge and you understand the operations, not perfectly, but to a large degree, the operations that are going on within your mind, you become proportionately less religious. | |
| The whole point of mental health maturity and wisdom and philosophy is to pound those projections back into the head so you don't mistake the world for yourself, so you have a clear delineation between What is going on inside your head and what is going on in the world, right? | |
| So you don't want to confuse your unconscious, which is obviously an internal process, with a god, although the operations can feel very much the same. | |
| Am I calling myself a god? | |
| No, not really. So I really, really liked that when Leonardo DiCaprio's character was talking to his wife before she killed herself... | |
| He was saying, when you fall, you will die, and there is nothing after that. | |
| There is no afterlife. He's not going to fall like Neo into the rubber, bounce up into the arms of God. | |
| When you fall to death, when you plunge into your grave, you die, and you dissolve. | |
| Your consciousness is like a light switch that goes off. | |
| The light doesn't go anywhere. | |
| It's just the energy which propels it ceases. | |
| And so he had a good knowledge of his unconscious and he also knew the difference between the unconscious or the inner world and the outer world, which is why he had this token as some ambiguity at the end. | |
| But this character had a good knowledge of himself and a way to tell the difference between the unconscious and the conscious mind and the external, tangible, material reality. | |
| And so he said to his wife, when you die, there's nothing. | |
| So he was not religious, he was not spiritual. | |
| I really like that association, that the more you understand yourself, the less likely you are to make the fundamental, primal, ape-like mistake of projecting your own hidden and powerful unconscious capacities onto some eternal sky ghost. | |
| And imagine that you're talking to some external consciousness when you're in fact in negotiation with yourself. | |
| So I thought it was really great. | |
| Highly, highly recommended. Not quite as good as The Matrix, but I'm not sure anything ever will be again. | |
| But highly recommended, and it's worth just, I mean, for a good third of the film, I think my mouth was just like, wow, that's so cool! | |
| And it was very imaginative and very well layered, and the time switching was very, very interesting, and I'm sure it would survive a second re-watching. | |
| So kudos to everyone involved. |
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