136. Maps of Meaning 08: Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation

[0] We should all be optimizing our health right now, and one of the most important ways to do that is by getting proper sleep.

[1] For many of us, that depends on having a good mattress.

[2] This is why I choose Helix Sleep.

[3] I have their mattress at home, and it's great.

[4] Helix Sleep is rated the number one mattress by GQ and Wired, and CNN called it the most comfortable mattress they've ever slept on.

[5] The best part is they're customized to fit your exact sleeping needs.

[6] Helix has a quiz that takes just two minutes and matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.

[7] And if you and your significant other hate the same type of mattress, you can get one that split down the middle made for each of you.

[8] No need to snuggle ever again.

[9] Kidding.

[10] But seriously, just go to Helixleep .com slash Jordan.

[11] Take their two -minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.

[12] Right now, Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders at helixleep .com slash Jordan.

[13] Get up to $200 off at helixleep .com slash Jordan.

[14] So one of the propositions that I set forth for you last week was that the most real things are the things that are most permanent across time and that manifest themselves in the largest number of situations.

[15] And those are the things that you have to map successfully in order to survive, survive as individuals, but survive as a species over a very long period of time.

[16] And so the question is, one question is, what are the constants of experience?

[17] If you are a follower of the evolutionary psychologists, and to some degree the evolutionary biologists, but I would say more the psychologists like Tubi and Cosmedes, they have a very afrocentric view of human evolution.

[18] And the idea, basically, is that after we diverged from the common ancestor between chimpanzees, bonobos, and human beings, we spent a tremendous amount of time in the African environment, mostly on the veldt, although we're not absolutely certain about that.

[19] We're also very good in water, human beings, and we have some of the features of aquatic mammals.

[20] So, well, hairlessness being one of them.

[21] Women have a subcutaneous layer of fat, our feet are quite nicely adapted for swimming.

[22] And so Buckminster Fuller, who I wouldn't call a mainstream evolutionary psychologist, hypothesized back in the 70s that we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history living on beaches near the ocean.

[23] That idea really echoes for me because we like beaches a lot, and it's a great place if you want to get easy food.

[24] And we're pretty damn good at swimming for terrestrial mammals, and we are hairless, and we do cry, salt, tears.

[25] And there's a lot of evidence that we, and our feet, if you think about our feet, they're quite flipper -like.

[26] I know we stand up and all that and walk, so that's part of the adaptation, but we're pretty good at swimming.

[27] So, anyways, the classical evolutionary psychology view is that we spent most of our time on the African belt, in the critical period of our evolutionary development, let's say, after we diverged from, this common ancestor and that we're adapted for that environment and one of the consequences of that is the idea that we're that things have changed so much around us that we're really not adapted to the environment that we're in anymore and I don't really believe that because I think that the idea that the primary forces that shaped our evolution shaped them during that period of time call it as roughly a seven million period year period of time something like that and that that was somehow a special time for human evolution that set our nature.

[28] I don't believe that.

[29] I mean, it's true to some degree, but it's more useful to view the evolution of human cognitive processes over the entire span of evolutionary history and not necessarily give preference to any particular epoch.

[30] And I certainly believe that the idea that we're no longer adapted to the environment, because of our rapid technological transformations, is simply not true.

[31] And the reason I think that it's not true is because the fundamental constants of the environment, let's say, or it's more of the fundamental constitute constituent elements of being, I think that's the right way to think about it.

[32] They're the same.

[33] They haven't changed a bit, and there's no way of changing them, as far as I can tell, without us being radically and incomprehensibly different than we are.

[34] And with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and robotics and all of that, it's certainly possible that in 500 years we'll be completely will be so unlike the way we are now that we won't even be the same creatures.

[35] I don't think that's a particularly great outcome, but it's certainly possible.

[36] So what are the fundamental constituent elements?

[37] Well, they're expressed in mythology, but they're not merely symbolic.

[38] I think it's the wrong way to think about it.

[39] They're symbolic, but they reflect a very deep reality, and they actually reflect a reality that's not easily apprehensible directly by the senses.

[40] Now, your senses are tuned for a particular duration.

[41] That's roughly, excuse me, that's roughly the duration that you live, let's say.

[42] But more importantly, it's the duration, whatever that duration is, across which meaningful actions take place.

[43] And we kind of have some idea of what that duration is.

[44] you know, if you look at a computer screen, if it has a refresh rate of less than 60 hertz, you can see it flickering.

[45] But above 60 hertz, you can't.

[46] It's uniform.

[47] And with movies, anywhere between 20 and 50 frames a second is enough to give you the illusion of continual motion.

[48] So, you know, we live in a universe that's above the tenth of a second domain, or maybe the hundredth of a second, somewhere in there anyways.

[49] And I mean, it's not like time isn't almost infinitely subdivisable at higher levels of resolution than that, but we don't operate, generally speaking, at higher temporal resolution than that.

[50] And then, you know, we're, our feeling of the felt moment seems to be, I would say, something approximating half a second to a second.

[51] You know, I mean, it's an estimate, obviously, but a second is a meaningful unit of time for a person, and a hundredth of a second really isn't, and certainly a billionth of a second isn't.

[52] And then, you know, we can think across hours and days and weeks and months, but we really can't, once you start getting out into years, it gets kind of sketchy, and it's hard to think more than five years down the road, and the reason for that is that the particulars upon which you're basing your predictions are likely to change sufficiently over a five -year period, so that extending out your vision past that just exposes you to accelerating error.

[53] Right, and that, of course, that's the problem with predicting the future period.

[54] So we live in a time range that's about, say a tenth of a second to three three years something like that now I know it can expand beyond that but that's that's kind of where we're set and our senses seem to be tuned to those durations and and to be operative so that we make proper decisions within those durations and and also from from a particular spatial position and so forth you know your eyes see what's roughly maybe we could say a walkable distance in front of you something like that so and you detect things in the locale that enables you to immediately interact with things.

[55] But it isn't necessarily the case that senses that are tuned to do that are also tuned to inform you directly about what the most permanent things about being itself are.

[56] I think that those things have to be inferred.

[57] And there's some supporting evidence for that kind of thing from psycholinguistics.

[58] there is a level of categorization that we seem to manifest more or less automatically or implicitly.

[59] So, for example, when children perceive animals, they perceive at the level of cat or dog.

[60] They don't perceive at the level of subspecies like Siamese cat or, or let's say, samoyed.

[61] You know, there's this, there's a natural, I can't remember what they call that, base category.

[62] something like that, it's usually specified by very short words that are easily learnable.

[63] And so the linguistic system seems to map right on to the object recognition characteristics of the sensory systems that are built right into it.

[64] And if they weren't built into it, we couldn't communicate easily because our natural categories.

[65] I think that's it, but it's probably wrong.

[66] Our natural categories, they have to be the same for everyone, or it would be very difficult for us to communicate.

[67] Okay, so having said all that, then the question is, Well, what are the most real categories?

[68] And I think there's a real division in ways to think about this because there's a scientific way of thinking about it.

[69] And in that case, the most real categories are, well, mathematical equations certainly seem to be in the top category there, the equations that describe the physical universe.

[70] But then the hypothesis of the existence of such things as protons and electrons and, you know, the material elements that make up everything that's, every element of being, with the possible exception of empty space.

[71] But in the mythological world, the categories, I think, are more derived from Darwinian, by the effect of Darwinian processes on cognitive and perceptual function.

[72] So, which is to say that we have learned to perceive and then to infer those things, that are most necessary for us in order to continue our existence, propagate, live well, all of those things.

[73] And that would be true at the level of individual survival, and maybe it's also true at the level of group survival, although there's a tremendous debate among evolutionary biologists about whether or not selection can take place at the level of the group.

[74] Anyways, there are these basic level categories that manifest themselves to you, and then there's categories of the imagination that you have to infer up from the sensory domain.

[75] We do that partly in science by comparing our sensory representations across people, but we also do it by thinking abstractly, conceptualizing abstractly.

[76] And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about abstractions is it's not clear whether they're more or less real than the things they're abstracted from.

[77] You know, this is a perennial debate among, let's call them ontologists, who are interested in the fundamental nature of reality itself, in some sense independent of conceptual structures, are numbers more or less real than the things they represent?

[78] It's a really hard question to answer, because using numbers as a representational system gives you unbelievable power, and there are mathematicians that believe that there isn't anything more real than mathematical representations.

[79] Now, it depends to some degree, of course, on how you classify reality.

[80] That's the problem with the question like, is A equivalent to B?

[81] The answer to that always is, well, it depends on how you define A, and it depends on how you define B. So generally it's not a very useful question.

[82] But you can still get the point that there's something very real about abstractions.

[83] Incredibly real, because otherwise, why would you bother with them?

[84] They wouldn't give you any handle on the world.

[85] So what's the most useful, or what's the most, what's the broadest possible level of abstraction?

[86] And is there any use of any utility and thinking in that manner?

[87] And I tried to make the case last time that in the mythological, world, there are three categories, or four, depending on what you do with the strange fourth category.

[88] Because the fourth category is sort of the category of uncategorizable entities.

[89] And so it's sort of the category of everything that not only do you not know, but you don't know, you don't know it.

[90] Or you can think about it as the category of potential.

[91] I actually think that's the best way to think about it, is that it's the dragon of chaos is the category of potential.

[92] And I do...

[93] We should all be optimizing our health right now, and one of the most important ways to that is by getting proper sleep.

[94] For many of us, that depends on having a good mattress.

[95] This is why I choose Helix Sleep.

[96] I have their mattress at home, and it's great.

[97] Helix Sleep is rated the number one mattress by GQ and Wired, and CNN called it the most comfortable mattress they've ever slept on.

[98] The best part is they're customized to fit your exact sleeping needs.

[99] Helix has a quiz that takes just two minutes and matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.

[100] And if you and your significant other hate the same type of mattress, you can get one that split down the middle made for each of you.

[101] No need to snuggle ever again.

[102] Kidding.

[103] But seriously, just go to helixleep .com slash Jordan.

[104] Take their two -minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.

[105] Right now, Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders at helixleep .com slash Jordan.

[106] Get up to $200 off at helixleep .com slash Jordan.

[107] So one of the propositions that I set forth for you last week was that the most real things are the things that are most permanent across time and that manifest themselves in the largest number of situations.

[108] And those are the things that you have to map successfully in order to survive, survive as individuals, but survive as a species over a very long period of time.

[109] And so the question is, one question is, what are the constants of experience?

[110] If you are a follower of the evolutionary psychologists and to some degree the evolutionary biologists, but I would say more the psychologists like Tubi and Cosmedes, they have a very afrocentric view of human evolution.

[111] And the idea basically is that after we dive, diverged from the common ancestor between chimpanzees, bonobos, and human beings.

[112] We spent a tremendous amount of time in the African environment, mostly on the veldt, although we're not absolutely certain about that.

[113] We're also very good in water, human beings, and we have some of the features of aquatic mammals.

[114] So, well, hairlessness being one of them, women have a subcutaneous layer of fat, our feet are quite nice.

[115] adapted for swimming and so Buckminster Fuller who I wouldn't call a mainstream evolutionary psychologist hypothesized back in the 70s that we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history living on beaches near the ocean and that idea really echoes for me because we like beaches a lot and it's a great place if you want to get easy food and we're pretty damn good at swimming for terrestrial mammals and we are hairless and we do cry salt tears and there's a lot of evidence that we and our feet if you think about our feet they're quite flipper -like I know we have stand up and all that and walk so that's part of the adaptation but we're pretty good at swimming so anyways the classical evolutionary psychology view is that we spent most of our time on the African belt in the critical period of our evolutionary development let's say after we diverged from this common ancestor and that we're adapted for that environment and one of the consequences of that is the idea that we're that things have changed so much around us that we're really not adapted to the environment that we're in anymore.

[116] And I don't really believe that because I think that the idea that the primary forces that shaped our evolution shaped them during that period of time, call it roughly a 7 million year period of time, something like that.

[117] And that that was somehow a special time for human evolution that set our nature I don't believe that.

[118] I mean, it's true to some degree, but it's more useful to view the evolution of human cognitive processes over the entire span of evolutionary history and not necessarily give preference to any particular epoch.

[119] And I certainly believe that the idea that we're no longer adapted to the environment because of our rapid technological transformations is simply not true.

[120] And the reason I think that it's not true is because the fundamental constants of the environment, let's say, or it's more of the fundamental constituent elements of being, I think that's the right way to think about it.

[121] They're the same.

[122] They haven't changed a bit, and there's no way of changing them, as far as I can tell, without us being radically and incomprehensibly different than we are.

[123] And, you know, with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and robotics and all of that, it's certainly possible that in 500 years will be completely, will be so unlike the way we are now that we won't even be the same creatures.

[124] I don't think that's a particularly great outcome, but it's certainly possible.

[125] So what are the fundamental constituent elements?

[126] Well, they're expressed in mythology, but they're not merely symbolic.

[127] I think it's the wrong way to think about it.

[128] They're symbolic, but they reflect a very deep reality, and they actually reflect a reality that's not easily apprehensible directly by the senses.

[129] Now, your senses are tuned for a particular duration.

[130] That's roughly, excuse me, that's roughly the duration that you live, let's say, but more importantly, it's the duration, whatever that duration is, across which meaningful actions take place.

[131] And we kind of have some idea of what that duration is.

[132] You know, if you look at a computer screen, if it has a refresh rate of less than 60 hertz, you can see it flickering.

[133] But above 60 hertz, you can't.

[134] It's uniform.

[135] And With movies, anywhere between 20 and 50 frames a second is enough to give you the illusion of continual motion.

[136] So, you know, we live in a universe that's above the tenth of a second domain, or maybe the hundredth of a second, somewhere in there anyways.

[137] And, I mean, it's not like time isn't almost infinitely subdivisable at higher levels of resolution than that, but we don't operate, generally speaking, at higher temporal resolution than that.

[138] And then, you know, we're, we're, our, our feeling of the, of the felt moment seems to be, I would say, something approximating half a second to a second.

[139] You know, I mean, it's an estimate, obviously, but a second is a meaningful unit of time for a person, and a hundredth of a second really isn't, and certainly a billionth of a second isn't.

[140] And then, you know, we can think across hours and days and weeks and months, but we really can't, once you start getting out into years, it gets kind of sketchy, and it's hard to think more than five years down the road, and the reason for that is that the particulars upon which you're basing your predictions are likely to change sufficiently over a five -year period, so that extending out your vision past that just exposes you to accelerating error, right?

[141] And of course, that's the problem with predicting the future period.

[142] So we live in a time range that's about say a tenth of a second to three three years something like that now I know it can expand beyond that but that's that's kind of where we're set and our senses seem to be tuned to those durations and and to be operative so that we make proper decisions within those durations and and also from from a particular spatial position and so forth you know your eyes see what's roughly maybe we could say a walkable distance in front of you something like that And you detect things in the locale that enables you to immediately interact with things.

[143] But it isn't necessarily the case that senses that are tuned to do that are also tuned to inform you directly about what the most permanent things about being itself are.

[144] I think that those things have to be inferred.

[145] And there's some supporting evidence for that kind of thing from psycholinguistics.

[146] there is a level of categorization that we seem to manifest more or less automatically or implicitly.

[147] So, for example, when children perceive animals, they perceive at the level of cat or dog.

[148] They don't perceive at the level of subspecies like Siamese cat or, or let's say, samoyed.

[149] You know, there's this, there's a natural, I can't remember what they call that, base category.

[150] something like that, it's usually specified by very short words that are easily learnable.

[151] And so the linguistic system seems to map right on to the object recognition characteristics of the sensory systems that are built right into it.

[152] And if they weren't built into it, we couldn't communicate easily because our natural categories.

[153] I think that's it, but it's probably wrong.

[154] Our natural categories, they have to be the same for everyone, or it would be very difficult for us to communicate.

[155] Okay, so having said all that, then the question is, Well, what are the most real categories?

[156] And I think there's a real division in ways to think about this because there's a scientific way of thinking about it.

[157] And in that case, the most real categories are, well, mathematical equations certainly seem to be in the top category there, the equations that describe the physical universe.

[158] But then the hypothesis of the existence of such things as protons and electrons and, you know, the material elements that make up everything that's every element of being, with the possible exception of empty space.

[159] But in the mythological world, the categories, I think, are more derived from Darwinian, by the effect of Darwinian processes on cognitive and perceptual function.

[160] So, which is to say that we have learned to perceive and then to infer those things, that are most necessary for us in order to continue our existence, propagate, live well, all of those things.

[161] And that would be true at the level of individual survival, and maybe it's also true at the level of group survival, although there's a tremendous debate among evolutionary biologists about whether or not selection can take place at the level of the group.

[162] Anyways, there are these basic level categories that manifest themselves to you, and then there's categories of the imagination that you have to infer up from the sensory domain.

[163] And we do that partly in science by comparing our sensory representations across people, but we also do it by thinking abstractly, conceptualizing abstractly.

[164] And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about abstractions is it's not clear whether they're more or less real than the things they're abstracted from.

[165] You know, this is a perennial debate among, let's call them ontologists who are interested in the fundamental nature of reality itself, in some sense independent of conceptual structures are numbers more or less real than the things they represent?

[166] It's a really hard question to answer because knowing, like using numbers as a representational system gives you unbelievable power, and there are mathematicians that believe that there isn't anything more real than mathematical representations.

[167] Now, it depends to some degree, of course, on how you classify reality.

[168] That's the problem with a question like, is A equivalent to B. The answer to that always is, well, it depends on how you define A, and it depends on how you define B. So generally, it's not a very useful question.

[169] But you can still get the point that there's something very real about abstractions, incredibly real, because otherwise, why would you bother with them?

[170] They wouldn't give you any handle on the world.

[171] So what's the most useful, or what's the broadest possible level of abstraction, and is there any use of any utility?

[172] and thinking in that manner.

[173] And I tried to make the case last time that in the mythological world, there are three categories, or four, depending on what you do with the strange fourth category.

[174] Because the fourth category is sort of the category of uncategorizable entities.

[175] And so it's sort of the category of everything that not only do you not know, but you don't know, you don't know it.

[176] Or you can think about it as the category of potential.

[177] I actually think that's the best way to think about it, is that it's the dragon of chaos is the category of potential.

[178] And I do believe that where our materialist view is essentially wrong.

[179] I think that the proper way of looking at being is that being is potential.

[180] And from that potential, whatever consciousness is, extracts out the reality that we inhabit.

[181] Anyways, that's certainly the mythological viewpoint.

[182] But it's not just a mythological viewpoint.

[183] It's a sequence of ideas, for example, that deeply underlies the thinking of Jean Piaget, and Piaget, by the way, was very interested in reconciling the gap between religion and science.

[184] That's really what he devoted his life to doing.

[185] And there are other streams of philosophy, and I would say Heidegger, the phenomenologists, are thinking along lines that are similar to this as well, because Heidegger was concerned not with the nature of material reality, but with being as such.

[186] And so you can extract out the viewpoint that I just described from mythology, but it isn't the only source of such, what would you call it, hypothesis is probably the right idea.

[187] So the idea, you can think about this as a bootstrapping process in some sense, is in order for anything to get going, it has to bootstrap itself up and become more and more complex as it does that.

[188] So it's like, this is the answer to the chicken and egg problem, right?

[189] Which was first, the chicken or the egg?

[190] Well, neither, something from which both the chicken and egg were derived, right?

[191] Because the ultimate answer to that is the answer to how there are things at all.

[192] Who knows?

[193] But at some point, there were neither chickens nor eggs, but there were the things that were the precursors to those things.

[194] And so they spiraled upwards in some sense, and those initial proto -entities, single -celled animals for, I mean, you can go back farther than that, but we could say, well, single -celled animals differentiated over time, right, and there's this looping process that differentiates out into both the chicken and the egg.

[195] But the question is, what do you need in order for that process to begin?

[196] And that's really the question of what the fundamental constituent elements of reality are.

[197] And the mythological hypothesis is that there's three or four.

[198] One is the fact that there has to be something that manifests itself as an observer.

[199] It's something like that, some kind of observer.

[200] Now, where that process of observation starts in the phylogenetic chain is very, very difficult to tell.

[201] You know, we might say, well, there's certainly no possibility of a conscious observer until there's a differentiated nervous system.

[202] But then prior to the emergence of differentiated nervous systems, there were animals that were complex enough to react with the environment in a manner that, well, single -celled animals, they're quite complex.

[203] I mean, some of them are unbelievably complicated, you know, they can move themselves through space, they can orient, they can follow chemical trails, They're not stupid by any stretch of the imagination.

[204] Now, to what degree they have being, you know, as something they can represent.

[205] Well, we don't have to speculate on that, but the proto elements of conscious being are there.

[206] So you need a being.

[207] You need the structure of that being through which the entirety of being itself is interpreted, and you need the surround.

[208] It's something.

[209] like that and so I conceptualized that as something that knows, that's the knower, what it knows, that's the interpretive structure, and that which needs to be known.

[210] Or you could conceptualize that as the individual in explored territory, nested inside unexplored territory.

[211] That's another way of thinking about it, or you can think about it as the individual inside culture and the individual culture has nested inside nature.

[212] That's another way of looking at it.

[213] Or you can think as the knower and in order surrounded by chaos.

[214] That's another way of thinking about it.

[215] But all these things, you know, they're all attempts to articulate the same underlying structure.

[216] You see that in narratives continually, and I think Pinocchio is a very good example of that, because in Pinocchio you have the culture, that's Geppetto.

[217] And Geppetto is obviously creative, but also insufficient and dead, which is why he ends up in the belly of the whale.

[218] You have the Blue Fairy, whose mother nature, for all intents and purposes.

[219] The negative feminine doesn't manifest itself much in the Pinocchio story, except implicitly in the form of the whale, the thing at the bottom, which is more like the dragon of chaos than something feminine, that swallows up culture.

[220] But you have nature, or culture, Chappetto, nature, the blue fairy, and then the puppet, Pinocchio.

[221] And, you know, from a strictly scientific perspective, we think of human beings as nothing but the children of nature and culture.

[222] And that pushes you towards a kind of deterministic view.

[223] What causes your behavior?

[224] Well, it's either nature or culture because there isn't anything else.

[225] But that isn't how the mythological story lays itself out because it says there is something else, and that's whatever your consciousness is.

[226] And that consciousness seems to be able to work with nature and culture in a non -deterministic manner in order to bring, well, in order for what?

[227] in order to bring itself forward.

[228] I mean, and that's really...

[229] And what's interesting about that, I think, is that it isn't obviously just the plot of Pinocchio.

[230] It's virtually the plot of any story, is the story of the development of the individual.

[231] Now, the story is order, chaos, higher order, roughly speaking.

[232] So you can get variance of that.

[233] You can get order collapses into disorder, and nothing is resolved.

[234] That's a tragedy, right?

[235] and you can get so you don't have to have the entire story represented in this story but you get fragments of it it's a classic U -shaped story and what it is is the story of the development of the individual across time as a consequence of his or her adventures in time and space and every story is exactly that and those are representations of the manner in which you come to be in the world for better or for worse and it's differentiated so the individual has a negative and a positive element, and culture has a negative and a positive element, and nature does as well, and that makes the potential for plots much broader, but, and I think it's also very useful to know that entire story, because I think it's one of the things that protects you against ideology.

[236] It's like, okay, if someone tells you a political story or a story of any sort, you can always ask, well, where are the missing characters?

[237] Human beings are terrible, they've erected a culture that's destroying the planet and nature is benevolent and pristine.

[238] It's like, yeah, fair enough, accurate, but you're missing half the characters.

[239] Because humans are not just terrible, rapacious creatures, and culture is not just a destructive force, and nature is by no means on our side.

[240] So, where's the missing characters?

[241] You need all the characters in the representation to get it right.

[242] And I really believe this to be true.

[243] So, for example, if you want to protect yourself against trauma as you move forward in life, you have to be very aware of the three negative characters.

[244] You have to know that the human individual has an adversarial element that's malevolent right to the core.

[245] And if you don't know that and you run across someone who's malevolent, you will end up damaged.

[246] So because first, you won't be able to defend yourself.

[247] You'll just be like a ripe fruit tree for the plucking.

[248] And second, the mere existence of someone like that will pose such a threat to, you'll pose such a threat to the way that you've organized the world, that it might collapse on you.

[249] That happens to people all the time.

[250] So it really matters whether you know these categories, and it matters that you know that culture can become tyrannical, but that it's also the father that's given you everything.

[251] And it matters that everything good comes from nature and that we need to live in harmony with nature to some degree, but that it's also hell bent on our destruction every second.

[252] And it's very paradoxical.

[253] It's a hard thing to reconcile with a thought structure like modern science that's based on a strict logic that always says something can't be itself and its opposite at the same time.

[254] But, you know, human beings can certainly be something and it's opposite at the same time.

[255] And anything truly complex can have that and does have that nature.

[256] If someone offers you a new job, you think, well, that's positive.

[257] It's like, no, it's not.

[258] It's positive and negative and complex.

[259] It might be the solution to your problem, but at the same set time, it's going to generate a whole host of other problems.

[260] So lots of times we're encountering entities in some sense that have an internally paradoxical structure, and we have to deal with that entire set of paradoxes, or we don't survive.

[261] It's really a matter of survival.

[262] Okay, so, so I'm, and then, you know, there's this overarching symbol, which is the dragon of chaos, which is potential itself, and it's the potential from which all of these categories emerge.

[263] And so the The most abstract category of our imagination is that which is beyond our understanding.

[264] The category of that which is beyond our understanding, and that seems to me to be represented, because we can only use the representational structures that we evolved, is that it's represented in our paradoxical representation of the predator and the treasure that lies beyond the perimeters of our safe societies.

[265] So what's out there beyond?

[266] Well, we don't know, but we need to know because we need always to deal with what we don't know.

[267] So weirdly enough, we have to come up with a category of what we don't know in order to start formalizing a theory about how we might progress towards it and interact with it.

[268] It's a very paradoxical idea.

[269] And there's a paradoxical answer, right?

[270] It's the terrible predator that lurks in the unknown that also harbors something of great value.

[271] Perfect.

[272] Perfect.

[273] That's exactly right.

[274] That's exactly right.

[275] And I think that that is a reflection of the fact that human beings are predator animals and prey animals at the same time.

[276] So what's out there in the terrible darkness?

[277] Something that can destroy you, but also something that you absolutely need.

[278] So how do you prepare yourself for that?

[279] And that's the ultimate question of life.

[280] It's not how do you deal with death, although death is a sub -component of the terrible unknown, I would say.

[281] It's how do you deal with that which is beyond your understanding, which is constantly manifesting itself in the world.

[282] And that manifests itself every time you categorize something and the thing escapes from the category.

[283] And that happens most in interpersonal relationships because people are so damn complicated.

[284] You get them figured out and boxed in.

[285] You even make a contract that neither of you will jump outside the box, but you jump outside the box continually.

[286] And that's why a relationship requires constant negotiation and reconceptualization because you do not exhaust the person with your perceptual categories.

[287] And of course, you don't exhaust the world with your perceptual categories ever.

[288] This is partly why the existentialists, they have this concept called alienation, and the idea was that human beings become alienated from their creative products.

[289] And that is, and here's why it happens.

[290] So imagine Henry Ford makes the assembly line, right?

[291] So Ford has no idea what's going to happen when he makes the assembly line, because he's just trying to figure out a fast way to make cars, or he thinks that what he's making is cars.

[292] So he thinks he's making an assembly line for cars, and he thinks he's making cars.

[293] And you think, well, what's wrong with that?

[294] Well, first of all, the assembly line absolutely transformed the entire planet, right?

[295] Because it brought in the era of mass cheap manufacturing.

[296] It's like it just, it was way more than he thought it was.

[297] And then did he make a car?

[298] Well, a car is something that hypothetically takes you relatively effectively from point A to point B. It was really a replacement for the horse and buggy.

[299] I mean, the first cars looked like that.

[300] They were horseless carriages.

[301] Well, did he make a car?

[302] Well, God, it's hard to tell what Henry Ford made.

[303] He made a very effective way for transforming the atmosphere, right?

[304] And the fact that it also happened to take you from point A to point B might be just completely irrelevant compared to the fact that it was the internal combustion engine and its rapid distribution completely changed the constituent, you know, the fundamental chemical structure of the atmosphere itself.

[305] it completely transformed cities it blew out the rural community everyone moved to the cities right it made all the cities built around the automobile but then it had this tremendous political and economic significance too so i mean part of the reason that because you think well is a car is a way to get from point A to point B but no no it's not a machine it's also the embodiment of an idea and it's a very strange idea a collectivist society would have never invented the car because the car is predicated on the idea that you could own a conveyance that would get only you and only you from somewhere to somewhere else without ever asking anybody for any permission.

[306] And so the funny thing is, is when you build something like that, those presuppositions are built into it.

[307] And then when you export that, say, to Soviet Russia, you don't get to, they can't just take the car and leave the political implications behind.

[308] The car, the mere fact that you step into one and drive it is an indication that you're accepting the political, ideological presuppositions that are part of the fact that that thing even exists.

[309] And so, well, that's alienation.

[310] It's like even something you make, you think, well, you have control over what you make because you've made it.

[311] You understand it.

[312] It's like, no, you don't.

[313] You understand a tiny fraction of it.

[314] You launch it out in the world, man, and the snakes inside of it, the hydra's inside of it, multiply their heads massively, constantly.

[315] And you can't really keep track of it.

[316] And so even in your relationship with created entities, you still see the re -emergence of this underlying fundamental substructure.

[317] Even inside, it's the Garden of Eden.

[318] There's always a snake inside the thing that's walled in.

[319] Always, always, always.

[320] Even God himself cannot get rid of the snakes in the garden.

[321] And partly what that means is that, you know, the garden is a conceptual system.

[322] It's the conceptual system within which people exist.

[323] That's Eden is a walled garden.

[324] Paradise means walled garden.

[325] And it's walled because a walled garden is where people live, because the wall is culture and the garden is nature, and we always live in a structure that's an amalgam of nature and culture.

[326] So we set it up so it's paradisal as long as we're unconscious, but we can't manage it because there's always something chaotic that's coming in that we will interact with.

[327] That's human beings.

[328] You put a snake in the garden, it's the first bloody thing we're going to talk to.

[329] And for better or worse, it makes us conscious.

[330] awake, it makes us aware of our mortality.

[331] It does all sorts of terrible things to us, but it doesn't matter, because that's the path that human beings have, what, chosen?

[332] Because that's the implication in that story.

[333] And it's a very difficult, it's a very difficult thing to answer because we certainly choose each other for self -awareness and consciousness and intelligence.

[334] And I don't, you know, if you're, if you're choosing a mate, there's an arms race in human beings.

[335] We're choosing intelligence.

[336] We're choosing intelligence.

[337] mates, especially, that's especially the case for women in relationship to men.

[338] So, the idea that that's a choice, well, that's partly why it's Eve that makes Adam self -conscious in the Garden of Eden, right?

[339] She offers them the apple.

[340] She's the one that makes himself conscious.

[341] And I think that's actually accurate, because the evidence from the evolutionary biologists is that human sexual, female sexual selection was one of the driving factors that differentiated us from chimpanzees.

[342] It's a major factor.

[343] Chimpanzee females are not selective maiters.

[344] They go into estrus, they'll mate with anything.

[345] What happens is the dominant males chase the subordinate males away, and so they end up leaving more offspring, but it's not a consequence of selection on the part of the females.

[346] In human beings, it's completely different.

[347] Concealed ovulation and intense selection pressure from women on men.

[348] You have twice as many female ancestors as you have male ancestors.

[349] People can never have a hard time working that out arithmetically, but it's not that problematic.

[350] You just think, on average, every woman had one child.

[351] Half of men had none, and the other half had two.

[352] And that's approximately correct if you average across the entire history of human sexuality.

[353] So human males in particular are subject to vicious selection pressure on the part of females.

[354] And I also think that's partly why nature is represented symbolically as female among human beings, because after all, nature is what selects.

[355] There's no better definition of nature than that which selects.

[356] So here's why I want to talk to you about the brain a little bit, because if you make the radical case, let's say, that these are actually the categories of reality, and we're going to say, well, reality is what selects for the sake of argument, then our neurological structures and our physical structure should be adapted to that reality.

[357] It's a necessary conclusion from that.

[358] So then the question is, well, are they?

[359] And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is yes.

[360] And so we'll go through the neuropsychological evidence quite rapidly.

[361] The first bit of evidence is that you have two hemispheres.

[362] Why?

[363] One deals with the unknown and the other deals with the known.

[364] That's Alconin Goldberg.

[365] That's hypothesized completely independently of any of the, this underlying mythological substructure, which is really important thing to note, because if you're trying to determine whether or not something is true, valid, if the constructs upon which you base your thinking are valid and true, there's rules for doing that, and one of the rules is you have to be able to detect the existence of the categories using multiple methods of, using multiple methods.

[366] It's the multi -method, multi -trade matrix, technically speaking.

[367] It was established as a technique by two psychologists named Kronbach, C -R -O -N -B -A -C -H -H, and Meal, M -E -E -H -L, Paul Meal, back in the 1950s, when psychologists were trying to figure out, how do you determine if something actually has an existence like anger or anxiety as something that you could study scientifically?

[368] And the answer is, well, you have to be able to measure it multiple ways, and all those measurements have to read the same way.

[369] And then the question is, well, what do you mean by multiple ways?

[370] Because is sight and hearing different, well, somewhat and somewhat the same?

[371] But, you know, you make them as different as you can manage, let's say, and our sensory systems are quite different.

[372] Smell, molecular signature, sound is auditory pressure.

[373] You need a gas around you or some liquid in order for that to occur.

[374] Site uses light.

[375] We're using different inputs that converge and allow us to say, well, if we get convergent information across these multiple, measurements then we'll assume that the thing we're perceiving is real.

[376] We even extend that in science because we say if you take your multiple measurement system and you take your multiple measurement system and then you compare them will only allow what's constant across both those comparisons to be real.

[377] And so that's the multi -method, multi -trade matrix process, essentially.

[378] And my sense is that so I think that the pattern that I'm describing to you has manifested itself evolutionarily.

[379] It manifests itself in the neurological space and it manifests itself in the conceptual space and the probability of all three of those things happening at the same time without there being something valid there is Lessons with each level of interpretation you manage to stack on top of one another So that's the that's the method.

[380] Well, so let's think about the brain a little bit and I'll tell you a little bit about how the brain works And and you know a lot of this stuff I'm telling you right now is quite old actually most of it was worked out in the in the 1980s but it's been remarkably stable as far as I can tell in some sense we're filling in the details and not in every sense but in some sense we're filling in the details okay so you take this is from Alexander Luria who was the the greatest perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived he was a Russian work mostly after the Second World War mostly on people who had brain damage and he was interested in trying to outline the the the the overarching picture of brain function.

[381] And so he did that partly by looking at its function, but also partly by looking at its structure, trying to get both of those things working simultaneously.

[382] And so we'll go through a brief picture of how the brain works.

[383] And so one of the ways of, so you can look at the brain from front to back and you can divide it roughly into two sections.

[384] And one section has to do with sensory processing, and that's roughly the back half.

[385] And one section has to do with motor output.

[386] Now, those things aren't as clearly differentiated as you might think, because there's very little sensation without motor output.

[387] Maybe the part that closest to an exception is smell, I would say, but you at least have to breathe in, you know, and when an animal is actively searching on a scent trail, it's breathing in.

[388] So it's using its motor output constantly to modify the sensory stream.

[389] It's really difficult to dissociate the two.

[390] When you're looking at something, you know, it kind of feels to you like you're a passive recipient of sense.

[391] data, but you're no such thing.

[392] Your eyes are moving back and forth in multiple ways all the time, including the ways that you can control voluntarily.

[393] So there's multiple involuntary systems that are moving your eyes in multiple ways.

[394] And really what you're doing is feeling the array of electromagnetic spectrum with your eyes.

[395] You're feeling it, and you're actively exploring if you're not a passive recipient at all.

[396] So even in sensation, you can't purely pull sensation out for motor processing and say, I'm getting untrammeled, unbiased sense data.

[397] Because you can't look at something without focusing.

[398] And you can't focus without wanting to look at something.

[399] You know, you can't just lie there with your, well, you could, with your eyes half crossed.

[400] But, you know, that's sort of like, imagine you dropped a video recorder from an airplane and it just spun around in an unfocused manner.

[401] Well, that's the world sampled randomly.

[402] You know, what are you going to do with that?

[403] nothing and you know you're you're concentrating on the on the on the auditory stream constantly and segregating out some things and and suppressing others like if you listen in the classroom you can hear probably four or five different types of mechanical noise going on at the same time most of the time in the classroom that's silent you don't hear it like you don't hear your fridge except when it turns on or off right you zero that out and so you're very selective in your perception.

[404] So you can't really technically separate out motor output from sensory input.

[405] And that's really useful to know because it destroys the idea that you're just a, you know, that there's a world of sensation out there that's imprinting itself on you.

[406] And that's how you get your information, which is really the, that's the fundamental presupposition of the empiricists, of the raw empiricists.

[407] There's a world of sense data out there.

[408] You sample it randomly and that's what informs you.

[409] It's like, yes, except that you're always an active harvester of the information.

[410] So you can't get rid of the interpretive structure, a priori.

[411] That was Emmanuel Kant, by the way, who first established that in his critique of pure reason.

[412] You can't get away from the fact that you're actively harvesting the data.

[413] So you can say, well, where does human structure come from?

[414] The sense data.

[415] That's sort of the blank slate idea.

[416] It's like, no, wrong, because a blank slate cannot process information.

[417] You're actively engaged right at the beginning.

[418] So that's another example of the knower and the unknown, you know, working in a cyclical manner, because you interact with something, you divide it up into you and the world, roughly speaking.

[419] And I mean, you really make it that way, because you build yourself out of the information.

[420] And then, of course, that makes you a more differentiated processor with a broader range of skills.

[421] Then you interact with the unknown again.

[422] You gather more information that differentiates the world it makes you a more differentiated harvester and then so it's just continually cycling and that consciousness the logos the knower is that thing that's doing that harvesting and you can never say it's not there now what happens is that it's in its nascent form to begin with low resolution nascent form low resolution knower low resolution category system low resolution world but that's enough to kick start it and to start at differentiating.

[423] And that happens as you develop as an individual, because you start out as a single -celled organism for all intents and purposes, a very low -resolution thing in a very low -resolution world, and that differentiates itself across time.

[424] But exactly the same thing happened over evolutionary time.

[425] So there isn't a time when those three elements aren't there for all intents and purposes.

[426] They're always there.

[427] They're permanent.

[428] Okay, so anyways, back to the brain.

[429] Since, unit, that's the back half, roughly speaking.

[430] Huge chunk of that is devoted to visual processing in human beings, right?

[431] Most animals organized around smell, not us.

[432] Somewhat still, because smell is a very powerful evoker of memories, and it has a direct relationship with emotional systems because you need to know if something is edible or inedible, terrible, or good, very, very rapidly.

[433] But human beings are organized around vision.

[434] So we have a massive, massive amounts of our cortex devoted to differentiated visual processing.

[435] Now the motor unit, so what you have is each of these little zones here, so for example look at the back here, that's the primary visual area and the secondary visual area and then this is the primary auditory area in the middle of the brain here on the outside and the secondary auditory area and then the this is for body representation, the primary area, and the secondary area.

[436] And you can think about those areas of primary, primary, secondary, and then tertiary.

[437] Primary does the base level processing.

[438] Tertiary expands that up into more abstract representation, or secondary, expands that up into more abstract representations, and tertiary are the areas where the senses come together.

[439] And that's really what you seem to be most conscious of, right?

[440] It's action in the tertiary areas because you don't really see the world.

[441] as a separate, you can think about the auditory stream separate from the visual stream and all of that, and you can think about touch separately, but you tend to consciously experience things as a unity, as a comprehensive unity of all the senses simultaneously.

[442] So consciousness seems to occur only at most of the time at the highest level of integration, and euleria would have associated consciousness more with the tertiary areas where the senses are talking to one another.

[443] Now, it's more complicated than that because there's obviously subcortical structures all the way down to the spine that are involved heavily in what consciousness is.

[444] It's not merely a consequence of cortical activity.

[445] You know, we tend to think that because human beings have massively expanded cortical structures, and we think of ourselves as the most conscious creatures, and that's reasonable, but you can take an awful lot of cortex off someone, and they're still conscious.

[446] In fact, you can leave them with almost no brain at all, and they're still conscious.

[447] So we really, have a rough time trying to figure out what consciousness is and how it's related to brain structure.

[448] So, anyways, so that's the sensory unit, and then the motor unit, you have the primary unit, the secondary unit, and the pre -motor, or the prefrontal cortex.

[449] And the prefrontal cortex is particularly huge in human beings.

[450] So imagine that it's this primary and secondary areas that allow you to, first of all, to act voluntarily, and then to and then to play around in some sense with your actions.

[451] You know, like, imagine that you're a child building with Legos.

[452] And you can think with the Legos without really having to think abstractly, right?

[453] Because you can play around and build different sorts of structures.

[454] And so you can think at a level of motor output without having to depend on abstraction.

[455] But if you develop the pre -frontal cortex here, which emerged out of the motor and premotor areas over the course of evolution, So it's a differentiation of those structures.

[456] So this is dealing with the real world.

[457] This is dealing mostly with the real world, but starting to abstract and experiment a little bit.

[458] And then this part deals with abstractions, pure and simple.

[459] So, you know, I can lift this, and then I can play with lifting it, and then I can put it aside and think about it.

[460] Abstractly, I can think about all the different things that I might do with it.

[461] I say, well, I could throw it, I could take it apart.

[462] I could throw I could toss it near or I could juggle it I could use it as a doorstop right I could kick it across the room and so basically what I'm doing there is I'm using my prefrontal cortex to generate an abstract representation of the world and then to plot out motor strategies before implementing them and that's basically what abstract thought is very very fundamentally it's it's the hypothesis of abstract action and then the analysis of the outcome and then the implementation into action.

[463] And I think that there's something about that that actually defines the difference between intelligence and conscientiousness.

[464] Because weirdly enough, you know, the correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero.

[465] No relationship whatsoever.

[466] Which is quite strange because conscientious people plan and so forth.

[467] But I think what it is is that intelligence is an indicator of the effectiveness of abstraction and conscientiousness is an indicator of the probability of implementation.

[468] And those are very, very different problems.

[469] And you don't just go from abstraction to implementation, because if you did, you wouldn't be able to think, right?

[470] The thinking has to be torn away from the implementation.

[471] Or what you're doing isn't thinking.

[472] It's just acting.

[473] So, and so I think that accounts for the psychometric independence of those two phenomena.

[474] It's annoying because you can think up something that you should do and you won't do it, because there's no deterministic causal pathway from the conception to the action.

[475] So that's kind of annoying.

[476] It seems to take something like willpower in order to transform the abstraction into an implementation.

[477] And we don't understand that very well.

[478] It's easy to understand the resistance to doing it because the default position of your body should be something like never do anything except eat, you know, because doing something requires the expenditure of energy and resources.

[479] And so unless you have a really good rationale for it, you should probably not do it.

[480] And so the body is sort of intransigent by nature.

[481] It's an oversimplification.

[482] You have to come up with a good reason to impel it into motion.

[483] And you should because you have to pay for action.

[484] You have to pay for it with energy and resources.

[485] So there should be resistance against it, but it's still annoying.

[486] So, okay, so that's one way of thinking about the world.

[487] world something to sense and the world something to act upon and so the brain has fundamental divisions of sensing and acting upon but they're it's a constantly interacting loop you can't separate them really any more than we are separating them conceptually now on the motor strip here the body is represented and this was discovered at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

[488] When brain surgery was being done on people generally who had epilepsy or some other terrible brain illness, you have brain surgery when you're awake, which is a rather horrifying thing to know about, but the reason for that, generally speaking, is so that something isn't taken out that you need.

[489] Now, one of the things that happened while people were having brain surgery done, and this would have been, I believe, I don't remember the exact time.

[490] Between the 30s and the 50s, I believe, and I think it was Hebb, if I remember properly, who was one of Canada's great neuropsychologists, would do brain stimulation while people were having brain surgery, and they could map out the way the body was represented on the cortical surface.

[491] And so you imagine there's two representations.

[492] There's a sensory representation of your body on the cortical surface, and there's a motor representation of your body on the cortical surface.

[493] Those are both called, the representations are called homunculi.

[494] They're like the body has been laid out on this strange strip, or this strip of tissue.

[495] You can look up the homunculi online and see what they're like, but I'll show you a, they're sort of stretched out weirdly along here.

[496] That would be the motor one, and then along here, that would be the sensory one.

[497] And you can kind of, you can kind of detect with your own consciousness how your body is represented in your brain.

[498] So, for example, can I get you to stand up, if you would?

[499] Let's turn around.

[500] Okay, so how many fingers on your back?

[501] Okay.

[502] All right, why?

[503] Low resolution.

[504] He's like a row on his back is like a low resolution array of pixels, right?

[505] And so it's virtually impossible.

[506] You just don't have enough sensory tissue on your back to make that.

[507] You could tell I was pushing, but it could have been a bat, it could have been five fingers, it doesn't matter.

[508] Maybe your pixel is this big or something like that, right?

[509] And so, but if I put a finger on your lip like that, man, you've got it right now, or on your tongue.

[510] Because your tongue, there's more sensory representation of your tongue than your entire trunk.

[511] And, well, why?

[512] Why?

[513] You don't want to bite your tongue.

[514] That's a big problem.

[515] You have to be able to talk.

[516] You want to really differentiate what you're eating.

[517] If you're eating fish, you don't want to eat the bones.

[518] And your tongue is unbelievably, crazily sensitive.

[519] And you know that too, that if you have a tooth pulled, your tongue will investigate that area for like six months.

[520] You're sitting there.

[521] Your attention wanes and your tongue is in there, like mapping, like mad, mapping that little whole time.

[522] update your body representation, right?

[523] And it's just this crazy thing that is unbelievably well represented from the sensory perspective and also from the motor perspective because you can manipulate your tongue like crazy.

[524] It's like a quarter of your motor output system is devoted to tongue manipulation, right?

[525] And so here's a picture of the homunculus.

[526] This is a motor homunculus.

[527] So that's what your brain thinks of your body.

[528] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[529] And so that's what a human being is like in terms of his or her output.

[530] And so what you see, if you look at a sensory homunculus, it's quite similar, except the feet are bigger, the genitalia are bigger, logically.

[531] They don't have much motor utility, but they have a lot of sensory utility.

[532] But the rest of it's quite similar.

[533] So there's, you know, the motor and the sensory homunculus are quite similar.

[534] But I'm going to talk about the motor homunculus because it's sort of the action representation.

[535] Well, so what are human beings like?

[536] well, we're all hands, that's the first thing, you know, and if you do that, there's no, it's unbelievably high resolution, your fingertips, and, and the, and the, that's sensory, but we can manipulate our hands like crazy, like they're unbelievably articulated, right?

[537] And that's the thing that makes us able to change the world.

[538] It makes us what dolphins aren't.

[539] And so a huge part of our brain is devoted towards being able to move our hands.

[540] That enables us to take things apart, put together and then once we learn to take things apart and put them together we can talk about how we do that and that's a lot of what we're doing and that's the hands and the mouth and the tongue roughly speaking here's how i took something to get apart chaos here's what i made out of it order here's how i did it and then you receive that and you're happy about it and then you can do the same thing and that's imitation facilitated by language it's like here's what i did with my body, I'm propagating across space, you're taking it, mapping it onto your body, now you can do the same thing.

[541] Yeah, and that's, you know, it might be simple, like this is how you pick up a rock, but it might be complicated, like, here's how you go after the dragon of chaos, right?

[542] And so that's, it sort of maps onto that hierarchy, this thing, that we've talked about in some detail, this.

[543] When you're telling a story to people, when you're informing them about something you can talk to them at a very high level of resolution which you do with your child here's how you slice up some broccoli right but then you move up the abstraction say here's how you act like a civilized person at the dinner table right and that's part of being a good person so you can tell stories about I just went and saw Logan which I really liked by the way it's super violent but I really did like it it's got a very elegant mythological structure which is not surprising but there's a scene in this Logan movie he he he it's not a spoiler he has this child with him who has not been who's been raised roughly in a laboratory and she has absolutely no table manners and so they're sitting at the dinner with some people that they've run into and she's you know eating like a total barbarian and of course everybody's eyebrows are raised like where did this person come from so the fact that that high order behavior isn't there is something that's of extraordinary interest to everyone and so So, you know, you teach your children micro strategies, and you teach the macro strategies.

[544] Some of the macro strategies you're teaching them, you don't even understand.

[545] Because you know the strategies, they're built into you because of an evolutionary process, roughly speaking.

[546] And you say things like, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game.

[547] And you don't understand what that means, although you know it's right.

[548] And you try to act that out for your children, and they incorporate it in their action, even though they can't represent it.

[549] They cannot come up with a fully articulated representation of what that means.

[550] And so they're like children, the Piagetian children, children can only play by themselves to begin with, while they're integrating themselves internally.

[551] Then they start to play in parallel with other children.

[552] So you're two.

[553] You play your game, that child plays his or her game, a little interaction, but you can't unite the games.

[554] Then you're between two and four, you start to be able to unite the games.

[555] And you can either do that by acting them out.

[556] You can do this even with a younger child.

[557] They can catch peek -a -boo very rapidly.

[558] But once you're between two and four and you start getting linguistic, you can start saying, well, let's play this game.

[559] And that means we're going to unite our attention towards a particular goal.

[560] We're going to unite our motor activity and maybe cooperate and compete towards that goal.

[561] It's the beginning of the social structure.

[562] It's the beginning of the social structure.

[563] And you get really good at that between two and four.

[564] But you don't necessarily know what you're doing.

[565] You can't say it.

[566] So Piaget's experiments indicated that if you take children, maybe they've got to the point where they can play quite a social game, maybe they're five or six, they're playing marbles.

[567] You take them out of the game and you say, okay, tell me the rules of the game of marbles.

[568] They give incoherent representations.

[569] Why?

[570] Because their behavior is more sophisticated than their representation.

[571] You see, as soon as you understand that, that is a wild thing to understand, because it answers the question, for example, how can you have dreams that tell you things you don't know?

[572] You think, well, how the hell can that possibly be?

[573] You're coming up with the damn dream.

[574] How can the dream tell you things you don't know?

[575] Or, analogously, how can people tell stories that contain information that they don't understand?

[576] And the answer is the information is coded in our behavior.

[577] Okay, so we'll go back to a chimpanzee troop.

[578] All the chimpanzees in the troop know the dominance hierarchy structure.

[579] But if you take a chimpanzee out from the troop and say what's the dominant structure, the chimpanzee is going to do whatever a chimpanzee does.

[580] It's not going to have a little conversation with you about the nature of the dominance hierarchy.

[581] So it can act out its knowledge and it might even be able to represent it an image, but it can't articulate it.

[582] Well, why would we be any different?

[583] We aren't, obviously, because we're more complex than we understand.

[584] So the fact that we're more complex than we understand means that we contain information that we cannot articulate Why can't that reveal itself?

[585] It does all the time.

[586] You have a revelation It's aha.

[587] I get it.

[588] Well what is that?

[589] It's maybe you're in psychotherapy and we talk about some things about your past and we say well this happened then this happened Then this happened.

[590] We say look.

[591] There's a pattern.

[592] Whap?

[593] And it's overwhelming.

[594] It's like now there's a concordance between your knowledge and the things that you're acting out and that's what comes as a revelation.

[595] So one of the things that happens in Exodus, Moses is leading his people through the desert.

[596] It's classic U -shaped story.

[597] They're in a tyranny to begin with, right?

[598] So that's the insufficient present.

[599] That's the old order.

[600] Then they cross the water, the destructive water.

[601] That's chaos, like the flood.

[602] Then they're out in the desert, wandering without direction.

[603] They start worshiping idols.

[604] They're wandering without direction.

[605] And then Moses goes up on the mountain.

[606] which is, by the way, what happens in Logan, just because if you're going to go see it, you might as well know that, because it's a journey up a mountain.

[607] He goes up the mountain, and he gets rules revealed to him.

[608] Well, the way the story is structured, it's extraordinarily interesting, because Moses takes people away from this tyrannical structure.

[609] But they don't go from tyranny to paradise to the promised land in one move.

[610] That isn't how it works.

[611] They go from a tyranny to absolute chaos, where everyone is fighting and killing each other and having a terrible time of it and half starving and having to pass through the Red Sea.

[612] They go from tyranny to catastrophe before they go to higher order.

[613] And Moses doesn't even make it to the place of higher order.

[614] He dies before he gets there.

[615] So it's quite the catastrophe.

[616] The Israelites are all confused when they're out in the desert because even though they were in a tyranny and they were slaves, now they're nowhere and they don't know anything.

[617] It's not good.

[618] And so a lot of them actually start thinking about how good the damn tyranny was compared to wandering around in the desert, which is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, right?

[619] In Russia now there's huge nostalgia for the Stalinist era.

[620] So these stories, they're always true, they're always happening.

[621] So anyways, what happens to Moses is that the story is quite interesting.

[622] So the Israelites start to fight amongst themselves, which of course they do, because there's no higher order authority.

[623] And so then Moses sits and judges them.

[624] like literally like a judge he sits for hours every day and the squabbling israelites come up and say you know he did this to me and oh you did this to me and and so then moses has to figure out who's right and who's wrong and he's doing this for like hours and hours for days and days for weeks and weeks for months it's like the origin of english common law it's exactly what happened with common law because in common law what happens is that you have all the rights there are if you two have a dispute you go before the judiciary you sort out the dispute that because becomes a precedent.

[625] Now that's part of the body of laws.

[626] The body of laws is what you act out.

[627] That's why it's a body.

[628] Well, that's what Moses does.

[629] So he's sitting there making judgments, very, very finely tuned, discrete moral judgments.

[630] You know how difficult that is when two people have a dispute to try to figure out how to mediate between that?

[631] You don't know who's lying, who's telling the truth.

[632] You don't know exactly what an acceptable solution would be.

[633] Like it's really ridiculously hard work.

[634] So he walks through this.

[635] entire process of continual judicial intermediation, then he goes up the mountain, and what does he get?

[636] Tablet of rules.

[637] Well, why?

[638] Well, he spent his 10 ,000 hours investigating the structure of morality in a practical way, and it goes, bang, this is what we've been doing.

[639] These are the rules.

[640] It's not like there's no rules to begin with, and those are opposed, because that wouldn't work.

[641] It doesn't work that way.

[642] You have to take how people are, extract out what the pattern of what they are is, reflect that back to them.

[643] Well, that's the story of Moses.

[644] And it's, it's a myth.

[645] It's a meta story.

[646] It's a story about how rules come to be.

[647] We act a certain way.

[648] We have certain kinds of expectations.

[649] We have certain kinds of disputes.

[650] Out of that, a patterned way of being emerges.

[651] Then we map the patterned way of being.

[652] We say, well, look, here's the rules.

[653] There's 10 of them.

[654] Or however many you want to extract, right?

[655] I mean, it's a moving target in some sense.

[656] Don't kill other people.

[657] That's a bad idea.

[658] Don't steal what other people have.

[659] Honor your parents, et cetera, et cetera.

[660] I mean, these are, you could come up with a different basic set of rules, but there'd be some overlap and those aren't bad to begin with.

[661] Of course, there were far more rules than that, but those were the central ones.

[662] And so then you might say, hey, if you took all 10 of those rules and you tried to extract out one rule from them that would be at the top of the hierarchy, what would that be?

[663] And in Western culture, the idea there is that do unto others as you would have them do unto you is the rule that, it's the meta rule that guides all other rules, sort of like the one ring in the, in the Lord of the Rings.

[664] And so it's this Well, and so that maps on to, well, there's a micro level that you instruct people at, and then there's a more abstract level that you instruct them at, and then there's a more abstract level, well, maybe at that point you can't exactly directly instruct them.

[665] Remember, in the Pinocchio story, Geppetto sits Pinocchio down and tries to lecture to him about what the highest level of moral virtue is.

[666] He sounds like a complete fraud.

[667] He sounds like a propaganda artist.

[668] He's a soapbox preacher, and Pinocchio doesn't understand him at all.

[669] Why?

[670] Has to be acted out.

[671] Now, maybe as a parent you can be a model for emulation, which is, so you're a model for imitation.

[672] What you say matters, but it doesn't say as much matter as much as what you do.

[673] Maybe it would if what you said and what you did were the same.

[674] That's the ideal situation, right?

[675] That's what you want to do if you're a parent.

[676] If you say one thing and act differently, your kids will torture you to death, and they're right to do it, too, because you're confused and confusing them makes them anxious and aggressive, and they will go after you.

[677] Consistency, consistency, consistency.

[678] And if you can't provide it, you'll drive them crazy.

[679] So you want to bring your words and your actions into alignment, right, and that's part of the development of wisdom.

[680] So, okay, so back to the brain.

[681] all right so there's the motor homunculus so now what i want to tell you about that is you just just think about what this thing is like it's taking the world apart and it's talking about it so that's what a human being is like and that to me that's kind of an image of the mythological hero it's the thing that can speak magic words and take the worlds apart take the world apart now in one of the stories i'm going to tell you today which is the story of the anuma eliz which is the oldest written story that we have.

[682] It's a Mesopotamian story, and it's from the same pool of stories that the creation account in Genesis was extracted.

[683] It isn't obvious what the temporal sequence was, but imagine there was a pool of stories in the Middle East that were of indefinite age, tens of thousands of years, and each of them were developed in a slightly different way, although the themes underneath were similar.

[684] There are great parallels between the Mesopotamian creation account and the first part of the creation account in Genesis.

[685] So it was discovered in the late 1900s, and ISIS just destroyed a huge treasure trove of that sort of manuscripts.

[686] So just so you know, so at Nineveh.

[687] So we can thank the war in the Middle East for the destruction of a huge treasure house of irreplaceable human knowledge.

[688] And a lot of that's happening very, very frequently.

[689] It's an absolute bloody disgraceful catastrophe.

[690] So, anyway, so, you know, that's the human being, lips, tongues, hands, and the face, your face is also extraordinarily amenable to voluntary manipulation.

[691] So you can learn to move single neurons in the tissue underneath your eyes.

[692] That's how high resolution your face is, and that's partly because it's a broadcast screen, which is why people are always looking at it, right?

[693] And that's why if you watch a movie, it's always concentrating on people's faces, is because they're just broadcasting.

[694] What?

[695] They're broadcasting their stories constantly and we're looking at their faces.

[696] What are you looking at?

[697] What are your eyes pointing at?

[698] What are you up to?

[699] What's your emotional expression?

[700] What are you going to do next?

[701] What do you think about me?

[702] Where are you going?

[703] And you're brought like you find someone who has had too much plastic surgery uncanny because their face is dead because you cannot tell what they're up to.

[704] They've got this zombie -like aspect.

[705] It's terrifying.

[706] And people like that, look, people like that got killed.

[707] That's why we're not like that, or they didn't mate.

[708] It's like, you want to know what that other person is up to.

[709] And I told you already, that's how the whites of our eyes evolved, right?

[710] Do you remember that story?

[711] Gorillas don't have that distinction between the iris and the whites, not like human beings.

[712] And our eyes are very sharp.

[713] And one thing we really want to know is, what are you looking at and why?

[714] What are you up to?

[715] And if I can tell what you're looking at, I can infer what you're going to do.

[716] And you want to broadcast that.

[717] Well, except when you don't want to broadcast it.

[718] but most of the time you want to be pretty transparent to other people because otherwise they won't trust you and if they don't trust you they won't cooperate with you they won't compete with you and the probability that they'll come after you is extraordinarily high because you'll be evil predator in no time flat so okay so we'll take a look at the brain from another perspective Now, a lot of this I got from Elkonen Goldberg.

[719] Well, that's not exactly right.

[720] I had laid this out before that, but I found Elkhone and Goldberg's writings afterwards, and he was a student of Lurias, and he was trying to account for why we had different hemispheres, roughly speaking, because it's not self -evident that we should.

[721] They're actually somewhat separate consciousnesses, and they communicate, but the communication isn't complete.

[722] It's like our brain is modularized and unified at the same time and you can think about it like a meeting of people Why do you want it modularized?

[723] Well, so if one person goes down all of them don't That's one one reason.

[724] So it's some separation of function Why else?

[725] Well Each little module can do its own creative thing independently of the others and that's useful and then there can be communication between them and so there's utility and modularity and there's utility and integration and part of what we're trying to work out on the global political scene right now is how modular things should be and how integrated they should be and the European community rushed into integration and that's bothering people dreadfully because they feel that the advantages of modularization have been washed away you saw that and maybe they're right because you saw what happened when Greece collapsed right and Greece is very very corrupt incredibly corrupt, and Germany, whatever else you might think about Germany, is not corrupt.

[726] And so the EEC tried to bring Greece and Germany together.

[727] That didn't work.

[728] There was no unity there.

[729] The modularity was actually useful.

[730] And the fact that Greece was so destabilized and Italy, also very corrupt.

[731] And Spain, also very corrupt, was very shaky, just about brought the whole thing down.

[732] The argument is the modularity would have been better conserved.

[733] Well, who knows, right?

[734] Because modularity is useful, and so is integration.

[735] But full integration seems to be a mistake, and so does full modularity.

[736] How do you get that right?

[737] We don't know.

[738] That's why we're arguing about it.

[739] And right now there's a backlash.

[740] We're pulling away from the integration.

[741] And you can see why, too, because in 2008, when the American economy collapsed, the world economy just about collapsed, that seems like a bad idea.

[742] You might want some separateness so that if one system, you know, if one system, you know, malfunctions and goes down the whole bloody thing doesn't go into flames and so we don't know we don't know how to manage that it's a really really complicated problem so anyways okay so how did the how does the brain work well the left roughly speaking in right -handed males and the reason that I'm concentrating on right -handed males is because they're simpler in their neurological structure women have a more complicated neurological structure and left -handed people tend to have a more complicated neurological structure.

[743] So we'll just say that, we'll just go with the standard model to begin with, and you can assume that the same systems are there in every person, but they're not laid out on the hemispheric structure quite as neatly.

[744] But they're still there.

[745] So it's sort of like these are tendencies.

[746] So for example, if you're a, so there's a tendency for the right hemisphere to specialize for what's relatively unknown, and the left hemisphere to specialize for what's relatively mastered.

[747] And you can think about it this way too.

[748] Left, right.

[749] It's something like that.

[750] Okay.

[751] So, large -scale, low -resolution abstractions tend to be the province of the right.

[752] High -resolution, detailed knowledge structures tend to be the province of the left.

[753] The left is linguistic.

[754] That's where the detailed structures manifest themselves in articulation.

[755] But the fundamental difference between the left and right isn't language versus non -language.

[756] fundamental distinction is relatively explored and mastered versus relatively unexplored and not mastered and that's both in terms of structure the right hemisphere has a less granular structure it's less differentiated it's also responsible mostly for negative emotion especially in the prefrontal part and the reason for that is well how do you encounter what's absolutely unknown imagination and emotion right I told you that little experiment that you could do if you're alone in a house and you hear a strange noise at night in a room, just turn off the lights and put your hand in the room.

[757] It's like your brain will just flash off monsters like Matt.

[758] You know, you'll be nervous because that, what's in that room?

[759] Something to make you nervous.

[760] That's a very low resolution category, right?

[761] It's like, it's a, it's some indeterminate manifestation of the category of things that might hurt you.

[762] Very low resolution, but a very smart category.

[763] It's like, don't put your hand in there.

[764] You put your hand in there and you watch your imagination.

[765] It's like monsters.

[766] It'll generate you.

[767] monsters like Matt and that's what the right hemisphere is doing it's saying what's in there is an exemplar of the category of things that are dangerous here's a bunch of images of those things and that thing in there is going to partake of that essence and that's a very low resolution hypothesis that's kind of what horror movies do with people you know they sort of lead them through that initial process and so and so that's what the right the right hemisphere seems to me to be dominated by dominated by subcortical processes was the left hemisphere is reversed.

[768] The cortex has more or less got dominion.

[769] And so the right hemisphere, well, we'll walk through this neurologically, but the right hemisphere responds rapidly to what's unknown, and that's subcorticals.

[770] The hippocampus is doing an awful lot of that, noting a mismatch.

[771] And then it's using the right hemisphere to abstractly represent what the possibility space is in relationship to unexpected things.

[772] And then the right hemisphere is tracking that continually what those unexpected things are and coming up with models of what you haven't yet mastered and that's kept separate from the left hemisphere which already has functional models and you don't want to blast the left hemisphere continually with the anomalous information because you blow out its structure and then you don't know what to do so the right hemisphere generates new models in some sense out of nothing and then when the time is right taps information into the left hemisphere slowly so that it doesn't disrupt its function too much.

[773] And a lot of that seems to happen when you're dreaming, by the way.

[774] It happens at night.

[775] So when what happens with the dreams, you think about how dreams work, is you might think of dreams as part of that process where ideas come to be.

[776] So they're low resolution to begin with, mostly imagistic, really highly emotional, and incoherent.

[777] Less coherent.

[778] Why?

[779] You can't be coherent unless you know what to do.

[780] A, B, C, D, E, E, If that's working, you've got coherence.

[781] But if you're dealing with something you don't know, you have to muck about with your category structures.

[782] And that's what dreams do.

[783] And, you know, when you're interpreting a dream, one of the things you watch for is the dream, the dream presents this and then this.

[784] That's called metonymy, by the way, from a literary perspective.

[785] And what that implies is this is related to this in some way.

[786] Why else would they be co -activated?

[787] You know, people say, well, dreams are random.

[788] That's the stupidest theory I've ever heard, like white noise is random.

[789] Dreams are not random.

[790] They're hard to understand, but they're anything but random.

[791] They're more random than real life.

[792] Well, that's because what you don't understand is really random, and you're organized, and there has to be an intermediary that's sort of quasi -random between them, or you never get from one to the other.

[793] And dreams and fantasies, myths, all of that, is part of that process that stretches you out beyond what you know into the absolute unknown.

[794] And so, and your hemispheres are differentially specialized for that.

[795] So, roughly speaking, right hemisphere, operation in unexplored territory.

[796] That's a really good way of thinking about it.

[797] You need a system that tells you what to do when you don't know what to do.

[798] A huge part of the subcortical structures are doing that too.

[799] Unknown, freeze.

[800] Then what?

[801] Imagine, right?

[802] Freeze, emotion, imagine.

[803] Then explore, then differentiate.

[804] Then master.

[805] That's the process.

[806] That's the process of learning.

[807] And what you're doing is you're transforming low -resolution representations of what's frightening into high -resolution representations that enable you to master it, to take the world apart, and to make ingenious things out of it.

[808] So there's this very cool part of the Mesopotamian creation myth, so the major hero whose name is Marduk confronts the dragon of chaos, Tiamat, who's feminine.

[809] And he cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world.

[810] world out of her pieces.

[811] And one of his names, he had 50, 60 names.

[812] And I think that was, those were amalgams of tribal gods.

[813] And one of the names was, he who makes ingenious things out of the conflict with Tiamat.

[814] It's absolutely perfect.

[815] That's exactly what human beings do, right?

[816] We confront that terrible predatory potential that lies outside our domain of experience, and we make ingenious things out of it.

[817] And then we talk about how we did it.

[818] And then we model how we did it.

[819] And that's the basis of our ethics and our morality.

[820] And the way that that ties into, think about, one of the things we talked about was that the mythological hero was a representation, not of the being that was at the top of the dominance hierarchy, but of the being that was at the top of the set of all possible dominance hierarchies.

[821] Okay, so here's a cool equation.

[822] The hero who goes out into the unknown to make contact with the dragon and to bring back the treasure is the same thing that wins the battle across sets of dominance hierarchies.

[823] And that's how the two things come together, right?

[824] It's so brilliant.

[825] It's so absolutely brilliant.

[826] And so it's the mythological hero.

[827] The mythological hero is the representation of what's, again, not at the top of one dominance hierarchy, but at the top of all of them.

[828] That's the eye that's above the pyramid.

[829] Why the eye?

[830] Because it pays attention.

[831] And that's what you do.

[832] None of this is, this is not fiction.

[833] It's meta -truth.

[834] It's a right way to think about it.

[835] Look.

[836] let's say you're socially anxious.

[837] Okay, so what happens when you're socially anxious?

[838] You go to a party, your heart's beating.

[839] Why?

[840] The party is a monster.

[841] Why?

[842] Because it's judging you, and it's judging you, it's putting you low down the dominance hierarchy, because that's what a negative judgment is.

[843] And that interferes with your sexual success, and that means that you're being harshly evaluated by nature itself.

[844] So you are confronting the dragon of chaos when you go into the social situation.

[845] And so what do you do?

[846] You're like this, right?

[847] You hunch over, and that's low dominance.

[848] I'm no threat.

[849] It's like, oh, that's not gonna get you very far.

[850] You know, but that's a logical thing to do in the face of a tyrant, so I'm no threat.

[851] You know, you look at the king and you're dead.

[852] I'm no threat, I'm hunched over.

[853] And then what's happening internally?

[854] How, what are people thinking about me?

[855] What are people thinking about me?

[856] Am I looking stupid?

[857] Am I looking foolish?

[858] Geez, I'm awkward.

[859] I hate being here.

[860] Man, I'm sweating too much.

[861] It's all internalized, right?

[862] It's all self -focused.

[863] The eye isn't working.

[864] The eye isn't working.

[865] What do you tell people?

[866] Stop.

[867] Don't stop thinking about yourself, because you can't.

[868] It's like, don't think of a white elephant.

[869] White elephant, white elephant, white elephant.

[870] You can't tell someone to stop thinking about something because they get caught in a loop.

[871] What you do with socially anxious people is you say, look at other people.

[872] Look at them.

[873] Right?

[874] Why?

[875] Because if you look at them, you can tell what they're thinking.

[876] And then you're, unless you're terribly socialized, then some people are.

[877] Some people have no social skills.

[878] And so the reason they can't go to a party is because they don't even know how to introduce themselves.

[879] Like they're just, no one ever taught them how to behave.

[880] And so they're really good candidates for behavior therapy, because you walk them through the process of how you actually manifest the procedures that are associated with social acceptability.

[881] most people aren't like that.

[882] They have the ability.

[883] So if they're really introverted and high in neuroticism, they can usually talk quite well to someone one -on -one.

[884] Why?

[885] Because they look at them.

[886] Well, if I look at you, it's another thing to do if you're ever speaking to a group of people.

[887] Never speak to the group of people.

[888] It doesn't exist.

[889] You talk to individuals, and then they reflect for you the entire group, because they're all entrained.

[890] So you look at one person, they broadcast you what everyone's thinking, and you know, how to talk to one person.

[891] So it's easy.

[892] So as soon as you focus on the person, not you, you push your attention outward, use your eye, you push your attention outward, and you start watching.

[893] Well, then all your automatic mechanisms kick in, and you stop being awkward.

[894] Because if we're talking, and I'm looking here, I don't know what you're going to do next.

[895] And I'm going to put disjunctions into the, like, they're like bad chords in the melody of our, of our conversation.

[896] And the reason is, I'm not paying attention.

[897] So that's why the I is the thing at the top of the pyramid.

[898] It's like the thing that enables you to win the set of all possible dominance hierarchies is the eye.

[899] Pay attention.

[900] Pay attention.

[901] That's the critical issue.

[902] That's why the Egyptians worshipped Horace.

[903] That's why Horace was the thing that rescued Osiris from the depths.

[904] It's the capacity to pay attention.

[905] What do you pay attention to most?

[906] What your right hemisphere signals as anomalous?

[907] It attracts your attention.

[908] It's like, this isn't going quite right.

[909] I'm not looking at that.

[910] Wrong.

[911] That's what you look at.

[912] That's what you look at.

[913] What's not going right.

[914] Because that's, see, that's the terrible monster that might eat you, but it's also the place you get all the information.

[915] So that's why it's useful to have discussions with your enemies.

[916] Because they will tell you things you do not know.

[917] And that's such a great thing, because if you don't know them, well, you're not very smart, are you?

[918] You know, there may be a time when you go somewhere.

[919] That's the thing you need to know and maybe your enemy will tell you why you're such a fool You know and a bunch of other things that aren't true too But even one thing that's accurate.

[920] It's like yeah, thanks very much man, maybe I'll do some work on that and I won't have to carry that forward So and then that's part of the reason again why the terrible predator It's always the terrible predator that has the gold.

[921] It's like it's the person who delivers the message you do not want to hear So it's rough.

[922] It's rough, but it doesn't matter life is rough Okay, so, how are these specialized?

[923] The right hemisphere, operation in unexplored territory.

[924] And that unexplored territory emerges whenever what you're doing doesn't work.

[925] You know, you can conceptualize it as that which is beyond the walls of the city.

[926] But the city is a category structure, abstractly, abstractly put.

[927] There's no difference between the barbarians that invade the walled city and the things that happen in the world that damage your category structure.

[928] They're the same thing from a practical perspective.

[929] Okay, right hemisphere.

[930] Operation and unexplored territory.

[931] Negative emotion.

[932] Inhibition of behavior.

[933] That's this.

[934] That's anxiety.

[935] That's what happens when the Medusa looks at you.

[936] You turn to stone, right?

[937] That's the basilisk and Harry Potter.

[938] It freezes you.

[939] Why?

[940] You're moving forward according to a schema.

[941] If you're moving forward properly, you're getting to where you want to go and the schema is being validated, simultaneously.

[942] I'm moving forward, and the map is correct.

[943] Something happens that's unexpected.

[944] What should you do?

[945] Stop.

[946] What else are you going to do?

[947] You stop first, then the predator can't see you, right?

[948] That's the freezing reaction of a prey animal.

[949] So it's built very, very deeply into you.

[950] Very, very old circuits do that.

[951] In fact, if it's a real orienting reflex to something that's normal, so you'll go like this, and that's to stop the thing that will jump on your back from tearing out your throat, and that's really, really fast.

[952] It's almost as fast as spinal snake reflex circuitry, extraordinarily fast.

[953] And, you know, that's conserved over an evolutionary span.

[954] That predator defense system is at the bottom of your cognitive apparatus.

[955] Everything's being built on that.

[956] Like, it's a low -resolution pattern, a higher -resolution pattern that's the same pattern is built on top of that.

[957] Then a higher resolution pattern, that's the same pattern, is built on top of that, and so on.

[958] But that initial architecture is duplicated across the levels of differentiation of the nervous system.

[959] That's partly why these symbols can be so archaic and still be accurate.

[960] It's still the way the world works.

[961] Negative emotion, inhibition of behavior, image processing.

[962] Right.

[963] Because the thing about images is they're fast.

[964] You know, a picture is worth a thousand words.

[965] Okay, you get the picture.

[966] you know, get the picture is actually something you say to someone if you say, do you understand, right?

[967] To get the picture is very, very fast.

[968] So the right hemisphere manages that.

[969] Holistic thinking, that's that low resolution thinking that generalizes across instances.

[970] Pattern recognition, pattern generation, and gross motor action.

[971] Yeah, freeze and get the hell out of there.

[972] That's gross motor action.

[973] The right hemisphere is very good at that.

[974] That's why if you're right -handed, use your, if you're right -hand.

[975] you use your left hemisphere to manage the really fine motor details, right?

[976] You write with it, you write with it.

[977] And because that's very, very, if you're right -handed, you tend to use your left hand to open the top of jars.

[978] Right?

[979] You use your left hand.

[980] That's a gross motor action.

[981] I mean, sometimes people are more lateralized than that.

[982] But the left hemisphere is specialized for the fine -grained things that you know very well.

[983] That's exactly it.

[984] Okay, the left hemisphere.

[985] Well, the left hemisphere, which is associated with positive emotion, by the way, that's specialized for operation in explored territory.

[986] So now what we might say is that you spend your whole life trying not to have your right hemisphere turn on.

[987] Because why would you want that?

[988] That's where the monsters pop up.

[989] So you stay in explored territory, but maybe you also tentatively expand its borders.

[990] And the left hemisphere seems to be involved in that too.

[991] So if you're curious about something, it's usually something you.

[992] Usually, something minor enough so that it won't blow your entire category structure if you explore it.

[993] Now, sometimes you get unlucky, and you're like Eve in the Garden of Eden.

[994] You go have a little chat with this little snake that seems to be of no significance whatsoever, and it feeds you something, the apple, it feeds you something, and bang, everything falls apart, right?

[995] You collapse, and you're out there in history.

[996] You're no longer in your old paradise.

[997] So, activation of behavior.

[998] Yeah, well, that's because positive emotion is associated with movement forward.

[999] Like if you're where you want to be and things are going well, then your behavior should be activated so that you go and get things.

[1000] Now, one of the negative consequences of that is that if you're really in a good mood, really happy, you're going to be impulsive and make mistakes.

[1001] You know, because you hear these doe -headed, that's a very minor word, people who are always pushing happiness as the key.

[1002] measure for successful existence it's so ill -informed that it's embarrassing that that even happens positive emotion makes people impulsive maniacs for example which is really if you that's mania right bipolar disorder if you're manic you're one happy person way too happy everything is great nothing but wonderful things that are beyond your imagination are going to happen to you and they're going to happen fast and so you're down to the mall to buy everything you can possibly get your hands on because you have a hundred uses for everything and then a week later you know you crash into your depressive episode and you realize that you're a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt and you've alienated everyone that you know it's like that's untrammeled positive emotion so how about no the a peer index of positive emotion is no way of determining whether or not a system is working properly even your own system you need a balance between positive and negative emotions Plus, positive emotions are absolutely exhausting, because if you're in a manic episode, it's like, it's time to get everything good right now.

[1003] Fine, but you won't sleep for a week, and then you die, because you just burned yourself to a crisp.

[1004] And so to be overwhelmingly enthusiastic about everything sounds like a real blast, and I've seen full -blown manics, and they're having plenty of fun, but it is not a pleasant thing to behold.

[1005] They're just all over the place.

[1006] And, you know, yeah, it's really not good.

[1007] It's really not good.

[1008] You need a balance between these two systems because the whole world isn't explored territory bursting with nothing but promise.

[1009] That's not the world.

[1010] The world is that in a bounded space a little bit with that absolute horror show going out around the periphery.

[1011] And both systems need to be active in order to keep you balanced.

[1012] people do unfortunately sustain damage sometimes to the left prefrontal cortex responsible for positive emotion or the right prefrontal cortex responsible for negative emotion and if you sustain right hemisphere prefrontal damage it makes you inappropriately happy and impulsive and your life just goes you just spiral downhill because you make nothing but impulsive decisions and you know what the world world consequence of that is you know get drunk and be impulsive for one night you can learn what the bloody consequences of that are you try living like that for a month independently of IQ that's the other thing that's so interesting you can blow out your left prefrontal cortex and not suffer much of a decrease especially in crystallized intelligence but the fact that you're running on nothing but sorry your right hemisphere you're running on nothing but positive emotion is going to auger you right into the ground and then if you're perhaps even more unlucky and you lose the left prefrontal cortex then you're permanently depressed because there's nothing but the unexplored manifesting itself.

[1013] We know that if you take depressive, depressed people and you do EEG analysis that they have predominant resting right hemisphere EEG activation.

[1014] And so, that's roughly, so why is this?

[1015] Well, unknown territory, known territory.

[1016] You think, well, is that real?

[1017] Well, it's real enough, so that's how your brain evolved.

[1018] That seems pretty damn real.

[1019] So then we can think about it subcortically, and we might as well do that.

[1020] This is mapped out on the hippocampus, most particularly by Jeffrey Gray, who was influenced by Sokolov and Vinogradova, who were also students of Luria.

[1021] Jeffrey Gray used cybernetic theory that was developed by Norbert Wiener, which is an AI, he was the father of artificial intelligence, and some of that was actually, integrated as well into Piagetian thought, because Piaget and Weiner, Norbert Weiner and Luria, if I remember correctly, all went to the same conference back in the early 1920s, mid -1920s, and heard Norbert Wiener speak.

[1022] So that's how cybernetic theory got built into some of these underlying theories and sort of manifested itself everywhere.

[1023] So Gray uses a model very much like this derived from cybernetic theory, and so here's the idea.

[1024] How does the brain work?

[1025] You have a target in mind.

[1026] Then you act to manifest the target.

[1027] You act to transform the world into the target.

[1028] And then you compare the consequences of your actions to the target.

[1029] And if they match, then that's a good thing.

[1030] And if they don't match, then that's where negative emotion comes from.

[1031] Okay, so how does that work?

[1032] The hippocampus seems to be central to that.

[1033] So it detects mismatch.

[1034] So in the classic behavioral theory, so this would be Gray's theory, you have your expectations of the world, so that would be your model.

[1035] and you have your sensory input which is the real world and then the hippocampus is mapping one on to the other one from a top downstream one from a bottom upstream and saying match match match match and as long as everything matches then the hippocampus this is an oversimplification keeps the subcortical emotional systems inhibited because you don't need them except for maybe mild positive emotion to keep you moving forward If there's a mismatch, that's anxiety.

[1036] The anxiety system gets disinhibited because it's on.

[1037] It doesn't get activated.

[1038] It gets disinhibited.

[1039] That freezes you.

[1040] And all the other motivational systems are primed because God only knows what you're going to have to do next.

[1041] Okay, so then if you make a mistake, given that scheme, you have to modify the world in order to rectify the mistake.

[1042] You have to modify your motor output so that you put the world back in order.

[1043] And that's basically Gray's model.

[1044] But Gray's model is insufficient because Gray presumes that what you're comparing your expectation with is the real world.

[1045] But you don't have access to the real world.

[1046] What really happens is that your brain compares the model of the world that you want to have happened, so it's desired and not expected, with the model of the world that you think is happening.

[1047] They're both models.

[1048] There's no direct contact with the truth.

[1049] And so what that means, and this is what's horrible about this, is that if your model fails, it doesn't only mean that you have to adjust your expectation and change your motor activity.

[1050] It means you might have to bloody well retool your perceptions.

[1051] Well, that's a lot more horrifying than just having to change your motor output.

[1052] If you betray me, then I have to see you differently.

[1053] And, you know, if we've interacted a long time, I've built up a hell of a model of you.

[1054] You know, it's taken a tremendous amount of effort to generate, and I may have used that model as a predicate for all sorts of other plans, which is what you do with an intimate relationship.

[1055] And so then if you do something that indicates a true mismatch, it isn't only that I have to adjust my actions.

[1056] God only knows what I'm going to have to retool.

[1057] I may even have to retool my perceptions of myself.

[1058] I'm a lot more gullible than I thought I was, for example, and God only knows what the implications of that are.

[1059] If you're close to me and you could do this to me, is that my flaw?

[1060] And am I carrying that into other relationships?

[1061] It's an absolute catastrophe.

[1062] And so Gray actually underestimated the degree of severity of mismatch because he only said, well, it was motor output and re -world adjusting that would have to be repaired, not perception.

[1063] Because like most behaviorists, see, the behaviors had this idea of stimulus, right?

[1064] The stimulus produces the response.

[1065] It's like, okay, what stimulus?

[1066] Well, they never went there.

[1067] They just assumed that the stimulus spoke for itself, but it doesn't.

[1068] That's the fundamental weakness of behavioral theory, is that the reason they could get rid of the mind was because they hid it invisibly inside the idea of the stimulus, which was all of a sudden not just something that was a sense, like a piece of sense data, but that had motivation built into it.

[1069] Well, no. No, you can't do that.

[1070] The motivation, you can put the motivation, in the object, but then it's no longer an object.

[1071] It's something completely different.

[1072] Okay, good.

[1073] Let's stop there.

[1074] When you come back, I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories, okay?

[1075] So we'll break for 15 minutes.

[1076] So imagine what happens when the civilization develops.

[1077] And it develops out of an amalgam of tribal organizations.

[1078] And so each of those tribes has their own God, which is their own sort of imaginative universe, and their attempt to make sense out of the moral landscape of being.

[1079] And underneath all of those representations is a pattern, and the reason there's a pattern there is because all of those tribes are made up of people.

[1080] And so there's going to be, it's like there's a domain within which variation is going to occur.

[1081] So if we're going to set up a structure that works across time, it's going to at least be roughly predicated on the same structures that a dominance hierarchy is predicated on.

[1082] It's going to be predicated on the same patterns of interactions that would characterize a chimpanzee troop.

[1083] You know, there's this basic biological, what would you call it?

[1084] There's a realm of biological necessity that constitutes the boundary space within which human interactions have to take place.

[1085] I mean, I can't be so violent that I kill everyone in my tribe.

[1086] That's not going to be very helpful because I'm a tribal creature.

[1087] So without the tribe, what am I going to do?

[1088] And so I have to be vaguely acceptable to other people because otherwise they'll kill me, even if I'm really, really powerful, they'll take me down.

[1089] And so, because I have to deal with you and you and you and you and you, we're going to modify each other continually and within parameters.

[1090] Now, the parameters are wide, but they're not non -existent.

[1091] And, you know, you can see what those parameters are, genuinely, if you look at something like a wolf pack or a chimpanzee troop, because those are stable across, really, the structured stealth is stable across at least hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years.

[1092] And so there's a, there's a, so Franz DeWall shows, for example, that with the chimpanzee troops, if you have a, he studied them mostly at the Arnhem Zoo, and I would recommend his writings highly, DeWall, D -E -W -A -A -L, he's interested in the, in prototypical moral behavior among chimpanzees.

[1093] It's a very interesting study.

[1094] And what he's showed, for example, is that if you have a particularly, the, the dominant, dominance hierarchy in chimpanzees is male.

[1095] There's a female dominance hierarchy too that overlaps the male and some of the females are more dominant than many of the males.

[1096] But the fundamental structure looks like it's patriarchal, roughly speaking, among chimpanzees.

[1097] If you put a really rough, tough, barbaric, brutal dictator chimpanzee at the top, his reign tends to be unstable and violent because he isn't good at negotiating social support.

[1098] And so he doesn't have any.

[1099] And so that two chimpanzees their friends can take them out and so that's what happens and so the the despot chimp is an unstable leader and the wall is shown that the more stable chimp leaders are more chimpanitarian I guess would be the right word it's not humanitarian they they do they have friends and you know friendship is predicated on reciprocity even among chimpanzees and so if a predicate of power is reciprocity, then that's one of the things that alleviates the dictatorial tendency.

[1100] So, anyways, so my point is, when a great civilization emerges, it emerges from the amalgam of tribal groups, and each of the tribal groups has their own ethic, but that ethic is, isn't, the ethics aren't entirely separate from one another.

[1101] That's why tribes can trade, because they do trade, they interact with one another.

[1102] It's kind of half, I remember, Here's how here to four separated tribes begin to trade.

[1103] Because you don't know, you meet each other across the river, and it's like you got your bows and arrows, and someone makes a mistake, and it's like warfare.

[1104] But you don't want to start the damn war because maybe you'll die, so you're sitting there with your bow and arrows, watching these guys, and now you know they're there.

[1105] And so then you go back to your tribe, and you think, oh, man, what the hell are we going to do about this?

[1106] And one solution is, well, let's find out where they are, and then we'll go in there at night and we'll, like, we'll kill a bunch of them, or we'll wipe them out or something like that.

[1107] Another solution might be, did you see all the neat stuff they had?

[1108] And so then what do you do is you find a border area, and you go and you put some things out there that are valuable, and you run away, and then you watch from the trees, and you see what happens when these other people discover these valuable things that you left there.

[1109] And if they're like little on the psychopathic side, they pick it all up and giggle and run away, and that's the end of that.

[1110] but if they have any sense, what they do is they leave some cool stuff on the ground, too, and then they run off, and then you can go pick up their cool stuff and leave.

[1111] And then it's like step one in the trust process.

[1112] And then maybe you do that, you know, for a year, and it starts to fall into a cadence, and then maybe, you know, you get a little closer when you're watching in the bush, and then maybe one day you have enough courage to kind of come.

[1113] You send your biggest, ugliest guy out there, and, you know, they do the same, and, you know, they look at each other, and finally they shake hands or something, like that and trade and then well then you've got a trading relationship established and so you can see in that the emergence of a what would you call it negotiated consensual moral structure that allows trading to take place and there's going to be rules emerge right away which is well you better leave me something that's of approximately equal value or I'm not going to play the game again that's the thing that's so cool is that if we only play a game once I can do whatever I want.

[1114] And so that's what psychopaths do.

[1115] They play with game once, and then they go play with someone else.

[1116] But if we're going to play the same game over and over and over, it's like the dominance hierarchy across time.

[1117] There's a different rule for playing a game once than there is for playing a game a thousand times.

[1118] And if we're in a relationship, the game we want to play is one that can be duplicated a thousand times.

[1119] And there's really tight constraints on that.

[1120] And so that's the origin that you could consider that.

[1121] The biological, it's not even biological exactly, it's predicated in biology, but it's a consequence of continual interaction.

[1122] The ethic emerges.

[1123] It's like the rats that I told you about that, you know, the rats that play with each other, the big rat has to let the little rat win 30 % of the time or the little rat won't play anymore.

[1124] And so because the little rat, that's the biological framing, the limitation is the little rat doesn't want to lose all the time.

[1125] That just produces negative emotion.

[1126] It's not fun.

[1127] It's not motivating.

[1128] So why would the little rat go play again?

[1129] So the constraints on our interactions are our biological constraints, and they manifest themselves in a patterned way across time.

[1130] And there isn't any difference between you and me interacting across time than there is between you and me acting, say, in the next hour or so with everyone in this room.

[1131] It's the same thing.

[1132] It's just continual human interactions.

[1133] And ethic emerges from that.

[1134] Now, different groups are going to code that ethic differently.

[1135] So they're going to come up with different imagistic representations and different stories.

[1136] Now, one of the things they're trying to figure out is, well, let's do it in the tribal way.

[1137] You have to do this inside a tribe, too.

[1138] You have 100 people, and 10 of them are leaders in one way or another.

[1139] And then out of that 10, you think, well, who's the best person?

[1140] So you have to have a hierarchy of value to determine what the most important aspect of the ethic is.

[1141] And it's going to be something like trust, because that's the predicate for continued interaction.

[1142] Trustworthiness.

[1143] It's not really any different than honesty.

[1144] It's not really any different from telling the truth.

[1145] So there's a really powerful necessity for honesty to emerge as a canonical value.

[1146] Caring might emerge.

[1147] power might emerge, right?

[1148] The ability to exert physical power, especially in places where war is continually likely, and in lots of tribal landscapes, it's just non -stop tribal trade and warfare.

[1149] But you can see how different ethics would emerge as canonical, depending to some degree on the situation.

[1150] But trust is a really crucial one, because without that, there's no relationships.

[1151] Okay, so you've got tribe A, and it's got its tribal gods, and its traditions and all of that.

[1152] It's representation of being in its images and stories.

[1153] And then you've got Tribe B and you've got Tribe C and you've got Tribe D. And now they're all coming together.

[1154] So what happens exactly?

[1155] Well, the tribes can go to war or they can talk.

[1156] And we're thinking about a communication that might be extending across a thousand years.

[1157] You have your beliefs, I have my beliefs.

[1158] I can overwhelm you, I can subsume you, but even then, I'm likely just to get indigestion from doing it.

[1159] It's very, very difficult to wipe out a set of beliefs without wiping out all of the people, and that kind of nullifies the utility of unification.

[1160] The more there are of you, the better you can defend yourself against other organizations that are trying to be larger.

[1161] So there's a powerful self -preservation impetus to cooperation.

[1162] And so one of the things you see happening in the development of the stories in the Old Testament, for example, we know this about Genesis in particular, that there were at least, this is relatively recently, so say for 3 ,000 years ago, not 50 ,000 years ago, there were two different stories.

[1163] There's two different stories in the Genesis account told by two different storytellers.

[1164] And people who are very good at textual analysis have been able to separate them.

[1165] and they were put together, I don't remember when, again it's probably about something between 2000 and 3 ,000 years ago, they were put together by what appeared to be a single editor.

[1166] And so he took these disparate accounts and tried to organize them into something that looked like a logical narrative.

[1167] And that was part of the process by which different tribal representations of the world were brought into something under which the tribes as a unit could simultaneously, exist.

[1168] So you can think about it as a competition between imagistic representations across time and then the emergence of some unifying narrative that captures the key elements of all of them well enough to bring them into some sort of union.

[1169] And it has to be a story with motivational power because otherwise no one will cotton on to it.

[1170] And it has to be a story that keeps uncertainty at bay because otherwise it doesn't have any utility.

[1171] So it has to be a functional story.

[1172] So I'm going to tell you a story like that, and it's the story of Marduk, and it's the Mesopotamian story.

[1173] And Mesopotamia is one of the earliest civilizations, and it emerged as a consequence of the amalgam of Middle Eastern tribes.

[1174] So over a very long period of time, you could think the gods of all of these tribes were warring in an abstract space, in a conceptual space, and that would be the space of argumentation and conflict.

[1175] And out of that, a meta story emerged.

[1176] And this is the meta story, and it's one of a whole, host of similar meta -stories that came out of the Middle East, one of which is the account in Genesis.

[1177] Okay, so here's the story.

[1178] So, there are two primary deities to begin with, Apsu and Tiamat.

[1179] Now, in order to understand that, well, here's how the Mesopotamians conceptualized the world.

[1180] There was a, let's call it a disk, that's salt water.

[1181] Well, why?

[1182] Well, what happens when you go to the end of the continent?

[1183] Salt water, everywhere, right?

[1184] So wherever you go, you run into salt water.

[1185] So that's the disk that surrounds everything.

[1186] Now, why is it a disk?

[1187] The world is a dome on a disk.

[1188] Why?

[1189] Well, say you're standing in the middle of a field.

[1190] What does the world look like?

[1191] A dome on a disk.

[1192] So it's a phenomenological representation.

[1193] So the bottom of the dome is the ground.

[1194] on which you stand.

[1195] What happens if you dig?

[1196] You hit water.

[1197] Fresh water.

[1198] So, the dome of the land is on a disk of fresh water.

[1199] What happens if you go to the edge of the land?

[1200] You run into salt water.

[1201] The dome of the land is on a disk of fresh water on a disk of salt water.

[1202] Okay, those are the two gods.

[1203] Tiamat is God of salt water and Absu is God of freshwater.

[1204] And it's happenstance in some sense, because that's the masculine and the feminine, and they could be attributed to all sorts of different geographical areas.

[1205] So, for example, see if I can think of a good example.

[1206] It doesn't matter.

[1207] I'll just leave that for now.

[1208] Okay, so the two primary gods are Apsu and Ta 'amat.

[1209] Tiamat is female, and Apsu is male.

[1210] And they're locked together in an inseparable embrace.

[1211] Okay, so how do you understand that?

[1212] Easy.

[1213] Yin and yang.

[1214] It's the same idea Here's another representation This is a cool one I've got a couple of them here that are really cool This is from China So this is So this is Fuxi and Nuwa I think I've got that right But I just love that reference It's so insanely cool this representation So you see The sort of the primary Mother and Father of humanity emerging from this underlying snake -like entity with its tails tangled together I really do believe this although it's very complicated to explain why I really believe that's a representation of DNA so and that that representation that entwined double helix that is everywhere you can see it in Australian Aboriginal arc and I'm using the Australians as an example because they were isolated in Australia for like 50 ,000 years they're the most archaic people that were ever discovered and they have clear representation of these double helic structures in their art. And those are the two giant serpents out of which the world is made, roughly speaking.

[1215] It's the same thing you see that in the staff of Asclepius, which is the healing symbol that physicians use, although usually that's only one snake, but sometimes it's two.

[1216] So that's a Chinese representation.

[1217] And then there's this.

[1218] That's the Egyptian representation.

[1219] We talked about the Egyptian story the other day, right?

[1220] We talked about Isis and Osiris.

[1221] So there they are, cobras.

[1222] Their tails are twined together.

[1223] See, they emerge out of that.

[1224] That's the dragon of chaos that manifests itself as culture and nature.

[1225] That's the representation.

[1226] That's unbelievably cool.

[1227] Okay, so anyways, back to the Mesopotamian story.

[1228] So Absu and Tiamat are their primordial deities, nature and culture.

[1229] They're entwined together, and they give rise to their first category of children.

[1230] And those are the, I think you could think about them as the elder gods.

[1231] Now, what do they represent?

[1232] Well, the question is, what do the gods represent?

[1233] And they represent sort of like primary modes of being.

[1234] It's something like that.

[1235] So think about Ares, or Mars, the god of war.

[1236] Well, that's a representation of single -minded aggression.

[1237] And then you can think about Aero.

[1238] or Venus, which is a primary representation of sexuality.

[1239] And you might say, well, why are those deities?

[1240] Well, that's simple.

[1241] They live forever, and they control you, and their personalities.

[1242] So that's that.

[1243] For that, it's like, yes, obviously.

[1244] You know, and you know that, you're under the sway of anger.

[1245] You're not in control of yourself.

[1246] If you're under the sway of erotic possession, you make a fool out of yourself.

[1247] You're a tool of the power that drives the continuation of the species forward.

[1248] Hunger is the same thing.

[1249] Any primordial motivational drive, we've conceptualized in this class as a personality.

[1250] But those are transcendent personalities, and they're eternal.

[1251] They're forever.

[1252] And so that's why the Greeks, for example, thought that human beings were just the playthings of the gods.

[1253] And this idea is echoed in the Mesopotamian story.

[1254] So then you can think about it sort of neurodevelopmentally as well, is that out of nothing, out of culture and nature emerges, say, the two -year -old.

[1255] The two -year -old is a battleground of primary motivational forces, and something like that is being hinted at in the Mesopotamian creation story.

[1256] The first progeny of the fundamental union of chaos and order, Apsu and Tymat, is the proliferation of these primary motivational forces.

[1257] They're sort of like the Titans, or the, what it was, that the Greek gods kept in the, underneath the mountain that Zeus, What's the name of that?

[1258] They're earthquakes and fires and that sort of thing.

[1259] They're primordial forces.

[1260] Okay, anyways.

[1261] So these children are produced, and what happens?

[1262] They're very noisy.

[1263] They run around doing all sorts of things.

[1264] You can think about them as grown -up two -year -olds, causing all sorts of trouble.

[1265] The first thing they do is kill Apsu and make their home on his corpse.

[1266] It's brilliant.

[1267] Now, the story doesn't say much about Apsu, other than that.

[1268] The culture deity, the primary culture deity is not elaborated up that much in the Mesopotamian story.

[1269] And I think that's probably because at the time of the Mesopotamian civilization was new enough so that we really hadn't mapped the mythology of culture.

[1270] The Egyptians did that much more.

[1271] And I know I told you that story first, but that's just how it goes.

[1272] So the elder gods make their home on the corpse of Apsu.

[1273] Well, what does that mean?

[1274] Well, that's sort of how it is.

[1275] You inhabit the corpse of culture, right?

[1276] It's the dead past.

[1277] But it's not just the dead past.

[1278] One of the things that's very cool about the Mesopotamian story is that the elder gods are foolish enough to kill it.

[1279] That's the death of God, by the way.

[1280] It's no different from what Nietzsche pronounced.

[1281] This has been going on for a very, very long time, this collapse of belief systems.

[1282] They kill it carelessly, they don't understand what it is that they need to survive.

[1283] They kill it carelessly, and then they try to live on the corpse.

[1284] I think that's what the postmodernists do, by the way, because they assume we have this tremendous system of value that's been built up across time, and it sustains us, and everyone is criticizing it and criticizing it and trying to destroy it.

[1285] And it's, well, we live in its corpse, and that won't nourish us forever.

[1286] It has to be replenished, and there's nothing.

[1287] in the postmodernist philosophy that can act to replenish.

[1288] Anyways, the kill Apsu.

[1289] What happens when you kill order?

[1290] Chaos comes back.

[1291] Tiamat.

[1292] Now this is Tiamat here.

[1293] Feminine, but also the dragon.

[1294] So it's, it's, you think, out of this fundamental reptilian treasure -bearer, culture and nature emerge, and they can pull back into that very rapid, So here's an example.

[1295] You've all seen Sleeping Beauty, I presume.

[1296] How many of you have seen Sleeping Beauty?

[1297] The Disney film?

[1298] How many of you haven't?

[1299] Okay, so there's a couple that haven't.

[1300] There's a scene in Sleeping Beauty where the evil queen has imprisoned the prince who's going to wake Sleeping Beauty up.

[1301] So he's the Logos, or he's the heroic individual, or he's that element of her consciousness that wakes her up.

[1302] You can read it either way.

[1303] She's got him trapped in a dungeon, so she's the kind of ultimate Edipal mother, you know.

[1304] She's the mother that has her 40 -year -old son in the basement, who's, like, overweight and unhealthy and watching video games and being covered with Cheeto dust, and she always, like, feeds him sandwiches so he won't leave, you know.

[1305] And she says, oh, it's a good thing you didn't go out in the world, make some poor woman miserable.

[1306] So, anyway, so that's the evil queen.

[1307] He's got the hero trapped in the dungeon.

[1308] So he goes out, he escapes, and then she goes after him to try to bring him back and turns into the dragon.

[1309] That's what happens in Sleeping Beauty.

[1310] So that's that reversion of the archetype into its even more primordial force.

[1311] So anyway, so Taimat is kind of an amalgam of feminine nature and also this more underlying primordial symbol.

[1312] So anyway, she is not happy.

[1313] She is not happy that these, her children killed her husband.

[1314] And so she thinks, oh, well, enough of these creatures, we're going to do them in.

[1315] It's a flood myth.

[1316] It's the same idea.

[1317] So what happens in the story of Noah, this happens worldwide, is that human beings get all corrupt and make a lot of racket and break all sorts of rules, and God thinks, oh, well, you know, enough of you, we'll just bring in a flood and wipe you all out.

[1318] That's chaos returning.

[1319] You destabilize order too badly.

[1320] There's a flood, and that brings with it all sorts of new things, because it's water, but it just drowns you.

[1321] It drowns you.

[1322] Now, Noah is a good man, so he can ride out the flood.

[1323] He's the hero that can go down into the chaos and then back up, because he hasn't let go of his morality despite the fact that the entire society has disintegrated.

[1324] So he saves everything.

[1325] So it's like Moses crossing the Red Sea and then coming out the other side.

[1326] Same sort of idea.

[1327] Anyway, so Tiamat, she's not happy.

[1328] And these gods are careless too and impulsive.

[1329] They're making a lot of noise and their activity disturbs her.

[1330] You know, and you can see echoes of that fear, that mythological fear in modern consciousness because we tell ourselves, the same story, right?

[1331] The story is, if we keep running around making enough racket, Mother Nature is going to take offense and wipe us out, and that's the story that's at the bottom of the sort of apocalyptic element of the global warming apocalypse.

[1332] It's like, if we muck about badly enough, nature will take its revenge.

[1333] Fine, it's true, it's true.

[1334] It's a story that's always been true.

[1335] So, anyways, the gods are making a lot of noise.

[1336] being impulsive, and then they make the fatal error of killing Apsu, and that's a big mistake.

[1337] And so Tiamat thinks, all right, enough of this.

[1338] She wakes up, and she thinks, ah, I'm going to wipe them all out.

[1339] Now, these gods, they're gods, eh?

[1340] I mean, they're not trivial characters, but they're pretty worried because they're gods, but Tiamat is their mother.

[1341] She gave birth to them.

[1342] She's mother nature, and if she's angry about it, then the jigs up.

[1343] And so what Tiamat does is she prepares this army of monsters, and they're described.

[1344] There's, I think, 13 different kinds of monsters, and they're chimeric images.

[1345] They're images of, you know, they're like dragons.

[1346] They're half snake and half bird and half animal, and they're monstrous images, and they're sort of the Mesopotamian's attempt to imagistically represent those things that might come forward as an onslaught.

[1347] And so it generates a whole 13 major monsters and then puts a whole army behind them, and she elects one of them, Kingu is his name, as head monster.

[1348] So he's, for all intents and purposes, he's an early representation of Satan.

[1349] He's like king of the bad guys.

[1350] And it's important to know about him because something happens later in the story.

[1351] So Tyamats preparing her army of monsters to chimeras to wipe out the gods.

[1352] And so they're like shorting out about this, but while they're doing it, they're still making a lot of racket and living the high life in Absou's corpse and propagating.

[1353] And while they're doing that, they send out one god after another to combat Tyamat.

[1354] And they all come back, failed.

[1355] So whatever these elder gods are, whatever they represent, they're not whatever it is that can confront chaos successfully and prevail.

[1356] Their powers, but they're not, whatever that is, that ultimate power.

[1357] And that's what the Mesopotamians are trying to figure out.

[1358] Who or what is king of the gods?

[1359] and King of the gods is the thing that confront chaos and regenerate order so they keep producing new gods and one day they produce Marduk he's bored and Marduk is a whole new category of God and every one of the gods knows it and he's got some very strange attributes one of them is he can speak magic words and so when Marduk speaks the night sky transforms into the day sky and vice versa so he's he's the verbal capacity it's a massive discovery It's a massive discovery by the Mesopotamians, because it's the first time we know of that the idea that it's the capacity for communicative speech as the primary deity should be at the top of the dominance hierarchy.

[1360] It's one of the most remarkable discoveries of the ages.

[1361] And he also has eyes all the way around his head.

[1362] So Marduk is the thing that can speak and see, and it's the thing that's...

[1363] So all the gods think, wow, well, this is a whole new thing, man. How about you go out and combat time at?

[1364] well it doesn't sound like much of a picnic you know the logical thing for any sensible god to say is how about no but marduk doesn't say that he says look i'll make you guys a deal you get yourself together in a hall you know and you have a vote for all intents and purposes and you vote me king of the gods and allow me from here on in to determine destinies that's exactly what the mesopotamians say he gets the tablet of destiny and he's now in control of it so the mesopotamians are working out this idea that it's the the thing that can see and that can talk, that should be the thing that guides destiny, especially if destiny involves having to go into combat with chaos itself and restructure the world.

[1365] And so Marduk says, those are the terms.

[1366] I'll do it, but I'm king of the gods.

[1367] And they all think, well, the fool's going to go out there and get killed anyway, so what do we have to lose?

[1368] And so they agree.

[1369] And so Marduk goes out to combat time at, and he takes a net and a sword.

[1370] and he, if I remember correctly, he fills her with a wind, which is, I believe, part of the manifestation of this voice idea.

[1371] He fills her with a wind, he encapsulates her in a net.

[1372] Now, think about what that means.

[1373] You know, psychologists even use this word phrase, nomological net.

[1374] And a nomological net is the network of concepts that you use to encapsulate something new in an ideational structure.

[1375] And so the idea of putting something in a net is to put boundaries around it, right, and to constrain it.

[1376] And so some of that's actually, well, you can capture a predator in a net and then cut it up.

[1377] But there's no difference between that.

[1378] There's a tight analogy between that encapsulating something novel in a conceptual network, which then enables you to cut it up into something useful.

[1379] Okay, so that's what happens.

[1380] Marduk goes out, he confronts Tyamatt, he overcomes the monster, monsters and he kills Kingu.

[1381] And so, and then he makes, he cuts time hidden to pieces, and he makes the world.

[1382] And that's the world that human beings live on.

[1383] And he makes the human beings to serve the gods.

[1384] Okay, so that's the first part of the story.

[1385] Now he also kills Kingu, and he makes human beings out of the blood of Kingu.

[1386] Now that's a hell of a story, right?

[1387] Because Kingu is King of the Demons, and human beings are the creature that's made out of the blood of the king of the demons.

[1388] It's a very simple thing of the idea to the idea, the later sort of Egyptian and Judeo -Christian ideas that there's a satanic element to being that's also characteristic of human beings.

[1389] And part of that is, well, what's the difference between human beings and every other element of being?

[1390] And the answer to that is, human beings can deceive you, right?

[1391] We're the only creatures that can do that.

[1392] We're capable of deception, voluntary deception.

[1393] We're capable of malevolence.

[1394] And so that's echoed as well in the story in Genesis.

[1395] because when Adam and Eve eat the apple, they wake up, the scales fall from their eyes, they recognize that they're naked, and they know the difference between good and evil, which means they can do evil.

[1396] And it took me a long time to figure that out, what that meant.

[1397] So imagine, because there's a causal sequence, hey, the snake offers you something that you ingest, it wakes you up.

[1398] Scales fall from your eyes, so now you can see.

[1399] The first thing you do is you realize that you're naked.

[1400] What does that mean?

[1401] Well, human beings stand upright.

[1402] The most vulnerable part of us is front and center to be hurt, but also to be judged, right?

[1403] To be naked is to be, that's terrifying.

[1404] You want to not die.

[1405] You want to cover yourself up.

[1406] And so that's the recognition of nakedness.

[1407] But then you might say, well, why does the knowledge of good and evil emerge from that?

[1408] As soon as you know you're naked and vulnerable, you know how to hurt other people.

[1409] You're not a predator anymore because they'll just tear you apart and eat you.

[1410] They don't want you to suffer, although they don't care.

[1411] They don't want you to suffer.

[1412] They just want to eat you.

[1413] But once I know what hurts me, I know what hurts you.

[1414] And then I can turn that into an art, and people have done that.

[1415] And so that's why the knowledge of evil comes immediately as a consequence of the knowledge of nakedness.

[1416] And that's associated with the same idea that human beings are made out of the blood of Kingu.

[1417] Nasty stories, but very, you know, they're messing with the fundamental structure of reality.

[1418] They want to get this right.

[1419] Okay, so one of the cool things about this story, so that's Martin.

[1420] Now, here's what's so interesting about that.

[1421] The Mesopotamians, they've got this story about the deities and how they organize themselves to respond to the emergence of chaos and how to master it.

[1422] You go after it, you declare yourself the thing at the top of the dominance hierarchy, your eyes in speech, you go out there voluntarily, you encapsulate the chaos, you cut it into pieces and you make the world.

[1423] makes you top god brilliant bloody absolutely phenomenally brilliant so what happens that's what's happening in the heavenly domain let's say what happens in the earthly domain the the emperor of the Mesopotamians is Marduk he's the he's the manifestation of Marduk on earth and he has to be a good Marduk that's because he might say well why should you be king well the answer to that is well you're most powerful no that's not going to work some other weasels will take you out why should you be king well because you pay attention and you speak properly and you keep chaos at bay and you make ingenious things happen as a consequence so that's what the bloody mesopotamians were trying to work out what should be sovereign and why okay so what did they do in the new year's ceremony so imagine that they're there there the king is in a walled city right so that's the king's at the top of the dominance hierarchy he's the eye at the top of the pyramid in a walled city with chaos outside chaos is outside that's the domain of time at the new year's ceremony The old year, we know about that, we still have this idea, the old year is an old man, the New Year is about to be born, there's an intermediary period of chaos, that's New Year's Eve, right?

[1424] That's the intermediate period of chaos where all the rules are temporarily suspended, which is why you can go out and party like there's no tomorrow, New Year's Eve, and before the New Year is born.

[1425] The Mesopotamian Emperor and all of his retinue and the people go outside the city on New Year's Eve, and they take statues that represent the gods, and they act out.

[1426] the story that I just told you with the statues and as part of that the emperor has to take off all his garbs his garments that make him king and kneel in front of the priest and the priest if I remember correctly slaps him with a glove it's something like that and tells him that he has to tell everyone why in the last year he wasn't a very good marduk and how he's going to do better in the future which is exactly by the way what you do when you make your new year's what do you call those yes the ones you immediately break the next day but it's the same it's this renewal idea and it happens that it happens in the depth of darkness in the middle of the winter before the light comes back right that's why it's set up that way so so anyways and so that so as long as the emperor is a good marduk then that's why he gets to be emperor and if he's not a good marduk then well someone else should be emperor so so so the emperor so that's the emperor is a good marduk then well someone else should be emperor so so so the emperor so that's the emperor so the emperor so that's that's how that works.

[1427] And there's some representations of it, eh?

[1428] So there's, there's, uh, tie a mat there, sort of a spirit matter combination, winged dragon, right?

[1429] The thing that we've seen so many times.

[1430] And there's Marduk, he's got angel wings.

[1431] Um, why the wings?

[1432] I don't know exactly why the wings.

[1433] I mean, he's obviously being assimilated to the idea of a bird.

[1434] I don't know if the idea of the far -seeing capacity of the bird was there for the Mesopotamian.

[1435] It's highly probable, but also the bird is something that flies up above everything else and that can see for long distances So it's an aerial spirit.

[1436] It's close to God and all of that So there's a very primordial representation of the same thing Look how much imagination does it take to see that that's the story of human beings encountering the unknown You know when you know the code it just seems self -evident.

[1437] Yes, well there is he's got his bow and arrow You know and he's out there fighting the monsters of the unknown and that's part of That's how human beings have survived.

[1438] You see, yeah.

[1439] And then, you see, here he's writing this great big snake, so that's another representation of the same kind of thing.

[1440] Okay, so let me just think for a minute and figure out what I want to do next, if I want to go somewhere next.

[1441] I guess what I'll do right now is I'll just show you some additional pictures.

[1442] So we've laid out the conceptual world to some degree, right?

[1443] And I mentioned that you can think about it as the potential itself, that's the dragon of chaos, and then nature, which has a positive, and a negative element, creation and destruction, and culture, which has a positive and negative emotion element, they're reversed, eh, because it's the positive element of culture that protects you against the negative element of nature, and the negative element of culture can be destroyed by the new coming in from the natural world, and then the archetypal individual, positive and negative as well.

[1444] That's the entire story, roughly speaking.

[1445] you its manifestations in figures like this so you have this is called the open virgin or the opening virgin because that those two halves can be closed so there's mother nature roughly speaking or the mother of of God depending on how you look at it and inside her nature culture the patriarchy the culture supports the suffering individual who voluntarily accepts death and mortality as the price to be paid for being that's what that image represents.

[1446] It's absolutely unbelievable.

[1447] And then you see all these people at the side here are gazing uncontrollably at this image, which is of course exactly what's happened over the last 2 ,000 years, at least in part of the world, because there's a tremendous idea encapsulated inside that image.

[1448] And the idea is something like the voluntary acceptance of suffering is key to its transcendence.

[1449] And that's a crucial psychotherapeutic truth, right?

[1450] Things that bother you need to be confronted voluntarily.

[1451] You have to accept them.

[1452] You have to accept them.

[1453] You think, well, how far does that go?

[1454] Well, we don't know.

[1455] It works in small things.

[1456] It works with phobias.

[1457] It works with traumas.

[1458] Traumas are usually associated with death or disease or malevolence.

[1459] So that's pushing it pretty far.

[1460] There doesn't seem to be a limit to the idea that the voluntary confrontation with the things that are terrifying is curative.

[1461] There doesn't seem to be a limit to that.

[1462] There's an example in the story of Exodus when Moses is leading the Israelites through the desert.

[1463] They fragment because, well, they're out of tyranny, so they don't know what to do.

[1464] It's all chaotic.

[1465] And, you know, this Moses character, yeah, he got them out of Egypt, but now they're in the desert and there's nothing to eat.

[1466] And like, why should they listen to him?

[1467] And so they start worshipping all sorts of idols.

[1468] And that's kind of like the fragmentation of what holds them centrally together.

[1469] And so what does God do?

[1470] He's not very happy about that.

[1471] So he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes into the desert to bite them all.

[1472] He thinks enough of these people.

[1473] And that's chaos returning, right, in the form of these poisonous snakes.

[1474] And so the Israelites are kind of sick and tired of being bitten by poisonous snakes.

[1475] So they go back to Moses and they say, well, you know, I know we've wandered off the path here and we didn't think you were the greatest guy there for a while, but, you know, maybe you could have a little chat with God and see what he could do about these poisonous snakes.

[1476] And so Moses entreats God to do something about the snakes and what God tells people to do.

[1477] It's the strangest thing.

[1478] He says, make a snake in the image, make a bronze snake and put it on a post and have everyone look at it and everyone who goes to look at the snake won't be bitten by the poisonous snakes anymore.

[1479] It's so it's it's it's crazy that idea.

[1480] It's crazy.

[1481] So I'll tell you something else that's very interesting.

[1482] So in the in the Christian story, Christ assimilates himself to that snake that was put on the post in the desert.

[1483] It says exactly the same thing that that has to be looked at because that's the pathway to salvation, roughly speaking.

[1484] It's exactly the same idea.

[1485] It's the worst thing that can possibly happen.

[1486] So you look upon it and meditate upon it, and that's the key to transcending it.

[1487] Well, so that's the idea that's encapsulated in that image.

[1488] So it's, you know, it's no wonder that these ideas had to be expressed in images because they're so unbelievably complicated that they're almost incomprehensible.

[1489] So they come out first in the image.

[1490] They come out first in the story, because they're just and plus they're so difficult to believe what the last thing you would think if you were being bitten by poisonous snakes was that you should make a bronze image of one and put it on a stick so that you could go look at it i mean there's a magical element to that but it's psychotherapeutically exactly right so i had this client and she had a dream about what she was she was having a really rough time and she was a pretty good dreamer she had this dream that she was walking down a road by there was an ocean on one side of what she was she was a and there was a sort of sand dunes on the other side.

[1491] And she looked up and there was this guy with a huge python that had been out there showing it to everyone.

[1492] And she took a look and he invited her to come and take a look at the snake, but she refused and walked on.

[1493] And so she told me that dream.

[1494] She was also quite imaginative.

[1495] So I said, look, let's try something.

[1496] First of all, tell me about the snake handler.

[1497] And she said, well, he's kind of a charlatan.

[1498] He's a show -off, he's a fake, and I'm afraid that if I went up to the crowd and where the snake was, that they would force me to touch it.

[1499] And so I thought, okay, so that's why you walked by.

[1500] I said, okay, so let's play a game.

[1501] So you sit there and bring that dream image to mind, close your eyes, bring the dream image to mind, but let's play with it a little bit.

[1502] It's like Jung's technique of active imagination.

[1503] Let's play with it a little bit.

[1504] So go up there, you know, imagine that you go up there, and you kind of have to do this like you're daydreaming.

[1505] You know, you can't force it.

[1506] You have to play with it like you would when you're daydreaming, which is you're kind of half doing it voluntarily, and it's half manifesting itself.

[1507] It's kind of a gateway between you and the collective unconscious.

[1508] That's another way of thinking about it.

[1509] And anyways, I said, okay, so go up there, and the first thing we're going to do is figure out, what are you going to do if the crowd tells you that you have to touch the snake or get close to it?

[1510] Because she needed a defense, because it isn't up to other people to force her to do that.

[1511] So we practiced what she might say.

[1512] It's like, no, I'm comfortable here.

[1513] I'm just going to stand in the background.

[1514] Just going to look at it and get accustomed to it.

[1515] I don't need you to push me forward.

[1516] So she felt pretty good about that.

[1517] So I kind of armed her with a defense, so then she could pretend to go up and take a look at the snake.

[1518] And I said, well, the first thing you should do is take a look at the snake handler and see if he's who you think he is.

[1519] And so she did that in her imagination.

[1520] She said, no, he doesn't seem to be a shardin at all.

[1521] He's got this snake that is something he takes care of.

[1522] And he just has come out here to show the people, let people look at this snake.

[1523] And so she said, I said, well, is he someone that you could trust or someone you shouldn't trust?

[1524] You have to ask both those questions, because otherwise you're leading the witness, right?

[1525] You don't want to tell people what to think.

[1526] You have to let them figure it out for themselves.

[1527] And she said, no, I think he's somebody that could be trusted.

[1528] And I said, okay, well, so what do you think that you could go up there and, you know, maybe lay your hands on the snake and touch the snake?

[1529] And she said she wasn't sure about it, but we went through it, and she was able to do it.

[1530] And so it's the same.

[1531] So she had to make contact.

[1532] She had to voluntarily make contact with this terrible snake that's at the bottom of being, that's at the bottom of the tree of existence.

[1533] Right?

[1534] That's where the snake is.

[1535] It's wrapped around the tree.

[1536] Well, why?

[1537] Well, partly because we lived in trees, and that's where the damn snakes were, down there on the ground, where we didn't know.

[1538] Right?

[1539] and that's the divine tree of being that and so well you have to get the hell out of the tree and go confront the snakes and then that's the that's the way out at least in principle so that's kind of what that means show you here's another image of the same thing what i like about this you see the fact that the the culture the patriarchy god the father will say here is is holding the the suffering individual in his arms and that's encapsulated by nature.

[1540] It's very much like the story in Pinocchio, where Geppetto, Pinocchio wasn't able to go down into the depths to confront the terrible monster at the bottom of being without having support from his father.

[1541] Even though his father ended up trapped inside the whale, if he wouldn't have been supported to begin with, he wouldn't have been able to do it.

[1542] And, you know, I've really seen this in people.

[1543] It's a hell of a thing not to have the confidence of your father.

[1544] It's really, really hard on people.

[1545] You know, if your father is someone who, says to you, you can do it.

[1546] I really believe that you can do it.

[1547] I'll support you in what you're doing.

[1548] I think that you can sort it out and then acts towards you in that way.

[1549] That's a gift that really almost no one else can provide you with.

[1550] Mothers obviously provide, I think they provide the same kind of gift but earlier.

[1551] You know, because the mother has to take care of the infant when the infant is just completely dependent.

[1552] And so, and this is Erickson's idea too.

[1553] Eric Erickson is the mother is the person who establishes the relationship that allows the developing person to manifest, Trust, real trust.

[1554] While you're being carried for crying out loud, you know, you can be dropped.

[1555] And the mother's also the source of food.

[1556] But the father seems to be something like the, and I'm being, I'm obviously parsing these things farther apart than they can need to be because the father can play a nurturing role and the mother can play an encouraging role.

[1557] But we'll keep it simple for now.

[1558] The father seems to be the thing that supports and encourages and says, well, yeah, you know, you're little and small and all of that.

[1559] And you're subject to destruction and bullying and.

[1560] social pressure and all that, but I know you can do it.

[1561] I know you can do it.

[1562] And there's a force in that that's unbelievable, and people who don't have that have a hell of a time.

[1563] It's actually one of the things that's quite fun about doing psychotherapy because you get people who have damaged father figures.

[1564] It's harder with the damaged mother figure, because it's so bloody deep.

[1565] You know, I had a client who I just thought she was a remarkable person, but her relationship with her mother was really disrupted.

[1566] It was really, really hard to, she said she would, she told me it was like something had been torn out of her at an early age that couldn't be replaced.

[1567] It's really, because you just can't be someone's mother, you know?

[1568] It's really hard.

[1569] You're just not there enough for that, but you can sort of be someone's surrogate father.

[1570] That's a role you can play later.

[1571] And that's what educators do, at least to some degree, although now they're trying to be mothers and providing safe spaces and all of that, which is not really all that appropriate.

[1572] So the father is an encouraging figure and allows the individual, at least in principle, to support the catastrophe of being, voluntarily.

[1573] And so, anyway, so those images, they're just brilliant beyond belief.

[1574] Absolutely brilliant beyond belief.

[1575] Okay, well, that's probably a good place to stop.

[1576] And so we've got through these two fundamental stories.

[1577] Remember, in the Egyptian story, you have much more development of the figure of Osiris, who's equivalent to Apsu.

[1578] And the Egyptians sort of walk through how the state becomes corrupt and deteriorates, and what the individual has to do in relationship to the state as well as in relationship to chaos itself.

[1579] So in the Mesopotamian story, it's mostly Absu's dead, and Marduk makes a new society out of the pieces, but it's pretty damn implicit, you know, it's not detailed, whereas by the time the Egyptians come along, they say, well, Osiris was great, he's corrupted by Seth, he has an evil brother, so that's the tyrannical element of the state.

[1580] He's overcome by the evil brother, which is the tendency of every bureaucratic system everywhere.

[1581] Things fall apart, chaos comes back up, the hero is born, takes on the corruption of the state, and goes into the underworld, which is like confronting Taimat.

[1582] But I like to have the stories in parallel because one of them is the confrontation with the absolute unknown, Taimat, and the other is the revivification of the state, even though the story is also overlap.

[1583] And so in the Egyptian story, So just like Marduk was the model for the emperor, the combination of Osiris and Horus was the model for the Pharaoh.

[1584] And then there was an idea that emerged out of Egypt.

[1585] This was called the democratization of Osiris.

[1586] And it's, I think, part of what gave rise to the entire Judeo -Christian set of ideas, because the Jews, hypothetically, came out of Egypt, right?

[1587] So that thinking is very deeply influenced by Egyptian ideas.

[1588] the pharaoh was the amalgam of osiris and horace and the amalgam of osiris and horace was his immortal soul the pharaoh's immortal soul and the pharaoh was allowed to use the symbolism of the conjunction of osiris and horus but as the egyptian societies developed the aristocracy started to get to use that symbol so it started moving down the hierarchy the idea that it wasn't only that the pharaoh was osiris and horus it was then it was the aristocracy And then by the time the Greeks came along, it was all men who were part of the political structure.

[1589] And then by the time the Christians came along, it was, no, no, wait a minute, this applies to everyone.

[1590] Men, women, and not only male and female alike, but also not just stalwart upholders of the state, but criminals, tax collectors, prostitutes, outcasts, everyone had this Osiris, Horace, soul inside of them.

[1591] and were entitled to be treated as if they were intrinsically valuable as a consequence of that.

[1592] And that's the bedrock, as far as I'm concerned, that's the bedrock idea upon which Western civilization is predicated.

[1593] It's the sovereignty of the individual.

[1594] And the individual is sovereign.

[1595] Why?

[1596] The individual is the eye that's up above the pyramid.

[1597] The individual is the thing that can dominate sets of dominance hierarchies.

[1598] The individual is the thing that plays not the game but the meta -game.

[1599] The individual is the thing that revivifies the dead culture.

[1600] The individual is the thing that goes out to combat chaos and generate something valuable as a consequence.

[1601] And that's why it's sovereign and valuable.

[1602] That's the foundation of our legal system and our culture.

[1603] So I think about it as an emergent property of Enlightenment ideals is dangerous because that's 400 years.

[1604] Who cares about 400 years?

[1605] this is forever and forever is a lot more firm grounding than 400 years it's not a set of rational ideas it's way way deeper than that so okay good enough we'll see you in a week