Episode Transcript
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TGI, the global island.
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Today we dig into the importance of stories.
We break down Dr. Jordan Peterson's quote that you can't interpret facts without a
narrative, an orientation structure, a frame of reference.
Matt details why Jordan is missing out on the East and how Hinduism and Buddhism can
actually shape this same argument.
We end this episode talking about the symbiosis with artificial intelligence and what that
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means for the future of philosophy.
But for now, Jordan Peterson's lecture at Harvard University.
I find this extremely interesting and the reason for this is because as soon as you
know, as soon as you know that we use stories to regulate our emotions, and as soon as you
know that there are two types of information that we need to gather, one being factual
information and the other information about how we should behave, then you have the possibility
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of reading mythological accounts or stories in general from a completely different perspective
because you don't have to think anymore, well, this mythological account, for example, the
creation of the world has no relationship whatsoever to the evolutionary theory.
We know evolutionary theory is more accurate, therefore this whole sequence of accounts
has to be cast into the realm of pseudoscience or superstition.
And then you lose all the information that's in those stories.
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As soon as you know that those stories aren't concerned in the least with the construction
of the world, but are concerned with the world as it has significance, well then you have
a whole new way of approaching them, a whole new way of interpreting them, and you can
start to understand the nature of the stories that's actually on their lighter culture.
And believe me, that's so useful.
Well, it's so useful, you can hardly believe it.
You find all of a sudden that all these stories that you've heard since your earliest days,
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stories that are basically rationally incomprehensible, as soon as you twist your pre-subpositions
about their origins just 45 degrees, then you can see the order in them exactly what
it is that they're trying to put forth, and they all of a sudden make sense.
That was a clip from Dr. Jordan Peterson's Mass and Meaning Lecture at Harvard.
Jordan has argued, I think throughout his whole career, there's a world of facts, and
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then there's a world of narratives, right?
The world of narratives, he believes religion is like the biggest mechanism by which narratives
are produced and kind of transmitted throughout time.
They tell us how to behave in the world, and the world of facts, which is a novel thing,
like Jordan argues that the Scientific Revolution is only really 500 years, and so our rational
discourse in the evolutionary time span is such a blink of the eye.
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He argues that the world of facts has to do with what is in the objective material world,
but the world of narrative has to do with how we ought to behave in the world.
We can kind of tease that out.
Then the kind of quote I want to talk to you about today that Jordan argues is that we
cannot interpret the world solely through facts.
Every single fact has to be interpreted through a hierarchy of value and through a narrative.
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And so I kind of want to pull your mind on that one.
You know, it's really funny, like, not to get off topic, I'm so surprised he didn't
study Hinduism earlier because it is just a juicy book.
The Mahabharana, or however you say it, is like this thick.
It's literally like nearly the size of my forearm, like in the length of just stories
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of gods and people and, you know, princes and everything working with one another.
And this is one of the things that is so guiding of, you know, Indian culture.
And you're right that these stories, some of these stories are believed at their religious
sense and some are very philosophically studied.
I mean, everybody knows the Bhagavad Gita, the whole story of Krishna and Arjuna, and
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this story is interpreted in so many different ways.
And those are the oldest stories, those are the oldest religious texts that we have available.
Absolutely.
I mean, I believe they are.
Yeah.
Yeah, I definitely believe they are.
I mean, anything that we have recorded, I know we have, what is it now, Gobekli Tepe
in southern Turkey that there is evidence of civilization and possible, you know, religious
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structures that goes back, I don't even remember now.
I want to pull up on this concept of story.
Okay.
And one of the things that he argues in that video that we use stories to regulate our
emotion, right?
And so what Jordan argues is he says this often that our worldview is like a raft in
an ocean of suffering.
And that ocean is this like nihilistic, existential dread, right?
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Of like just not having any sort of orientation in the world.
And the thing that's holding us, that's buffering us from being in an existential crisis is
our worldview raft.
What he argues is that stories play into that raft and allow us to kind of regulate our
emotions.
So let me give you an example, right?
The world can become very chaotic very quickly as you're growing up and there's so many contradictions
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all over the place.
And so one way to kind of simplify and to give yourself an orientation is we tell little
kids bedtime stories, right?
And our nervous system is actually primed to be more interested in learning the story
than learning the periodic table of elements.
No kid wants to be shown the periodic table of elements before they go to bed.
Maybe a few really smart type A children, but the average child wants to hear about
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David and Goliath, right?
And there's some sort of embedded moral narrative inside of that story that has facts, but those
facts are less important.
It's the actual like implicit moral story that tells us how we ought to behave without
being preachy.
It's basically like a meme.
It's a transmission of information implicitly.
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Well, it's a fiction.
Like as a man-
A useful fiction, yes.
Well, no, it's not.
See, it's funny because immediately I say fiction and you have to say it's a useful
fiction.
Because fiction has like a negative rapture.
Fiction does have like, you know, not to get all postmodernist, but it's like a word-
In a rational world, fiction has a negative connotation.
But it does.
I mean, so when we're looking at it from a man, well, Kant, you have to look through
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his dictionary, focus on the word fiction.
I think Hans Weihanger did a much better job sort of elaborating on this.
A fiction is essentially a story or not even just a story, actually something that may
exist but does not actually exist.
For example, when Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, this capitalistic idea was actually
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completely fictitious worlds.
Now, in reality, it's served a lot of benefit and there's a lot of issue with it as well.
But, you know, in reality, it became- it is a fiction.
There is nothing real actually behind the story of capitalism or now neoliberal belief.
I don't even want to call this capitalism.
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So, these fictions can be applied at both, like you said, like that metanarrative level,
but also as a level of how we actually live and interact like within our lives.
Let's break that down, okay?
So, like, let's talk about the nature of existence in like a materialistic world, right?
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Do you think SpongeBob exists?
In my best Canadian accent, I want to say, well, what do you mean by exist?
Does SpongeBob exist?
I mean, do those whom experience understand SpongeBob and the concept of SpongeBob, then yes,
yes, SpongeBob does exist within the culture and exists throughout generations
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and is a unifying thing throughout generations from late millennials till the current gen alpha.
Everybody knows SpongeBob.
So, it does exist in the narrative.
Sure. Okay. So, you're answering from a much more, I would say, like religious perspective
and much more kind of maybe like sociological.
I would say that right now in our like materialistic postmodern world,
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if you are consistent with that philosophy, you have to say that SpongeBob is nothing more
than photons on a wall, on a TV screen that are, you know, coming into our eyes
and then being processed by our, you know, neural cortex.
And then, you know, that information is then being transmitted via, you know, dialogue and storytelling
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or like books or whatever.
But this is where I think I became much more convinced that there's a world that is in the objective world
that isn't material.
And this is really the mystery of consciousness.
Our greatest scientists do not know what the hell consciousness is,
nor do we know where thoughts are happening.
I can literally like, I can go to Albert Einstein's brain and I can try to, you know, dig in there
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and nowhere will I find equals MC squared, right?
None of the neurons are going to have it written down.
And so, it's like where the hell are these thoughts actually taking place?
And so, the subjective phenomenological experience that I'm having thoughts is so real.
Like right now, like I'm just thinking of an elephant, right?
And I bet, you know, the listener probably thought of an elephant as I said,
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primed their brain, maybe you did as well.
It's like where the hell is that elephant?
Where is that elephant actually existing?
And for us to just materialistically say that that elephant doesn't exist, I think would be foolish.
And so, going back to like, does SpongeBob exist, I think that there is a world of like semantics
and there's like a world of thoughts and things that exist in this other domain
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that we have yet to kind of create a science about that I think do exist.
And I think the religious people are the ones who have picked up on it.
Like when they say you're possessed by a spirit, right?
Like I believe that kindness could be a spirit that could actually possess you.
And when you come around a person who's like extremely kind and you're like,
and like you spend a lot of time with a lot of more like cynical people,
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that sort of persona becomes contagious, right?
And it's like, it's almost like a spirit of kindness kind of possesses you
and then primes your behavior going forward to be more kind.
Listen to you say all that. What I really took away from it is that existence kind of comes from interaction.
And there's insanely different levels of interaction.
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There's immediate interaction like we're doing.
There's interaction of me touching a keyboard and you know, producing sound.
And then there's interaction of stories to different people's brains.
And I don't think there's anything ever that's going to be universal about it besides the fact that
the only thing that may be universal to humans is simply the fact that they are humans.
And if, and they interact with things, that's one of...
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So do you think that like consciousness is just the interacting of minds?
I think it's the intersection of minds.
What does that mean?
Indra's net.
I think I explained it.
You've brought it up in the past. Can you elaborate on it?
All we are is the entirety of existence, the idea that we are just the big bang experiencing itself.
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We, consciousness, our experience as humans is nothing that's actually special as compared to say a chicken or a rock.
It's simply just is that we experience things.
We can be aware of the experience of things.
We can interact with things in different levels.
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These interactions create what we call consciousness or experience.
I'm still not getting a clear definition of interaction.
Interaction is everything.
It's yin and yang.
It's yin and yang.
You can't not interact with anything.
One of my qualms with the East, I just feel like the East is qualms everything.
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Well, this isn't necessarily just the East.
I know. I do think that the West is really good at singling things out and specifying.
The East just goes, everything is.
It is.
But why does every definition from you, it's always wrapped up in the bow of, well, everything is actually just this one, everything is.
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Because it is. How is it not?
It does seem, okay, once again, like I said to you, from my meditative practice, I have sympathy towards the propositions that you're laying forth.
But from my scientific rational mind, my snake oil salesman, a bell goes off in the brain, you're making so many jumps here.
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You're not really showing A to B, B to C, unlike your deductive reasoning.
But it doesn't necessarily exist.
So, for example, say I go to different religious facilities, which I have in the past, I haven't had the time to recently, right?
I go to a mosque, I go to a temple, see what Jews believe, see what Muslims believe, see what, you know, Sufis believe, see what Christians believe, Protestants, Pentecostals, whatever it may be.
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These are the interactions that are non-universal.
This is why I don't believe there can ever be a universal religion.
But religions speak to certain people and it's through the interactions that they have in their life, through their understanding.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
I'm getting a little bit better.
Okay, so let me give you an example and you tell me if I'm on the right track.
So like a Jiyin environment relationship interaction, there is no such thing as a good Jiyin, there's only a good Jiyin environment relationship.
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Yeah, you're right.
Sapolsky's way is a good way of understanding this.
Okay, so now I'm getting a better, you know, grab on this.
So you're focusing on not the actual material A and B, but the relationship between A and B and how that is something unique in and of itself that is a phenomenon, that is not material, but it still exists.
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Exactly.
The relationship, the interaction.
We all experience, it doesn't matter which religion you are, it doesn't matter which fiction or which story you believe in, whether it's David and Goliath or Buddha or, you know, or Muhammad.
It really doesn't matter which story, which fiction, you know, to not, you know, upset the religious folks to say capitalism, communism, which, you know, fiction you believe in, which way to live your life.
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Well, it doesn't matter from your perspective.
It does, but it doesn't.
So explain.
When you're a human, you have the human experience.
We all do.
There is that psychological, the phenomenal experience that we experience life through the human eyes.
Sometimes you call it the ego, sometimes the psychoanalytic self, you know, there's so many different ways to actually call it.
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You know, I think Carl Jung was such a great psychologist because I was listening to a speech that he, a talk that he was giving on death, and he was saying, you know, I choose, you know, I don't have to believe something that there is no evidence in, but I do not discount it.
Simply because there is no like full evidence when discussing death.
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You need evidence to also disprove something.
Yeah.
I mean, this is where I like really appreciated Jung's opinion.
I guess you could say Jung's fiction on death was one that was both completely ground in science.
But also open minded.
Exactly.
But also where it wasn't drowned by science.
Sure.
You understand what I'm saying?
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Yeah, well, okay, well, this goes to a term that I have been using every single day for the past two weeks, thanks to you and Jachubi T, methodological pluralism.
I think if there's one term that probably should sum up our podcast, it's probably that one.
Methodological pluralism.
And it's not a term that I've heard often, but I very much appreciate it. And I think it's kind of this next maybe philosophical era that we're in.
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I think it kind of did, like in this postmodern era where everything is relativistic and nothing is greater than anything else because they all just are narratives.
This is where I think the next kind of philosophical era is what Peterson argues.
Yes, everything is narratives, but there's also a hierarchy of values that puts into line different narratives the same way that it would put into line different facts.
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I mean, yes.
It's like a meta narrative.
Yes, and certain people do experience these narratives, question them, think about them, you know, people like you and I.
But that to me is the meta cognition.
Same, elaborate.
Okay, so meta cognition is just thinking about thinking.
So instead of – so like look, most people when they are growing up religious, they're not really critically thinking about their religion.
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They're just behaving in the world as they're being conditioned to behave.
And for them, as you said, for many people, they find in their unique interactions, they find their useful fictions.
We all do, right? Our worldview, protecting us, right?
And then there's this like next level of maturity where people start to actually question their orientation.
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Not their sexual orientation, but for some they do.
But they start questioning their frames of reference, right?
And this is where Jordan talks about Nietzsche.
Nietzsche talks about now what happens if, let's say for me, right, I grew up fundamentalist Christian.
Now I leave that frame of reference and I go, wow, I can't believe I believe that.
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And now let's say I'm like a materialistic atheist.
And then all of a sudden, I'm learning about consciousness and I'm like, wait, this does not square with my materialism at all.
So then I leave materialist atheist.
And now I'm just like, okay, so two of my frames of reference that I had so much faith in thinking that these were the correct orientations of the world were disproven to me.
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Who says that the one that I'm holding onto right now is going to be correct?
Because it's probably not going to be.
And this is where Nietzsche argues that you lose faith not in just one frame of reference, but all frames of reference.
And this is where, you know, Nietzsche argues that people fall into nihilism.
Nietzsche completely failed because he didn't understand the East at all.
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Seriously, no, this is where the Kyoto School really comes in, where Nishikani really like offers the Buddhist middle way.
Nietzsche is so focused on the boat that the Buddhist method, what Siddhartha Gotima essentially discovered,
and you could even say to a further extent what Marcus Aurelius in Stoicism sort of was dabbling with is this idea that that boat is actually slight.
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That is the fiction.
It does not actually need to be this way.
To reach towards the steps of enlightenment, you need to give up the boat.
Okay, let me give you a parable that Sam Harris has talked about that I think is adjacent to this.
He talks about this man who was a famous monk, right, and he gets shot in the heart from an archery man that accidentally shoots him, right?
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And the archer runs up and instead of noticing that the man is bleeding out because he shot him with a bow,
he just gets so overwhelmed that he's meeting his celebrity crush, if you would, and he's like,
can I take a photo with you? Can I get your autograph?
And this guy's bleeding out and the archer who shot him is just so preoccupied by his attention to the fact that he's meeting his celebrity
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that he is not focusing on the most important and significant and relevant thing, which is that this man is bleeding out and he needs help.
And so what Sam argues is that if you think that the world is just about propositions and just about knowledge,
you're missing the other side of the coin, which is attention.
And if we're training people solely in knowledge, we are missing out on training them also in attention.
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And it's not solely about knowledge, it's about the awareness and the movement of attention to say what is most relevant.
So going back to the boat narrative that you were bringing up, right, how you said we were clinging so strongly to that boat.
Most people who are doing that are not aware that they are because they haven't practiced phenomenological attention moving, right?
They haven't practiced metacognition.
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And it's those things that the Eves have been doing for countless years that makes them the scholars on it,
where the West, which is so propositionalized, has a way to learn that.
Absolutely. I think two great scholars on this are from Japan, Nishikami from the Kyoto School,
and from I believe it's South Korean and German, Byung-cho Han. I don't know if you've heard of him before.
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No.
It's annoying because there's definitely these like edgelords online that like to go towards these guys
because they almost seem very like in line with say Franz Kafka, and it seems very nihilistic,
but it's not. It's a misconception that it would be nihilistic.
Instead, they focus on where you were saying like, okay, the search for knowledge and you need to focus on attention.
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Byung-cho Han wrote this book, The Burnout Society, focusing on how in our neoliberal society,
there's this complete, the fiction of our neoliberal society, it almost incentivizes individualism and narcissism
to the point that we are always burnt out and that everything's commodified to our identities and our way of being.
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And he's interesting because he doesn't just, this is where the Western nihilists, you know, the edgelords are wrong,
because he turns around and says, well, you do know how I combat this. I sit in silence, I garden,
and I forgot his other thing. Maybe it was read like something, you know what I mean?
It was essentially taking away that you, you know, in the past, you used to work physically,
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and then you would rest and you would actually be physically rested, but now we work mentally,
and we're never actually mentally rested, so our attention can never actually function, if you'd say.
Yes, full agreement with that. Not just about like the cognitive labor that we're doing,
that we're not even realizing we're doing much more cognitive labor, but I think it's also, as you point out,
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the individualistic and hyper-focus on the concept of self, this illusion that the East kind of has practices
that allow us to kind of dispel of the sense of self. The crazy thing is that the statisticians in psychology,
when they were kind of mapping out all negative emotion terms, the one that was basically adjacent to all of them,
that can kind of summarize them, was self-awareness, that all painful emotion is actually correlated with more self-awareness.
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And so the more time that people are being primed and conditioned to be in a state of their default mode network,
of just rummining on their concept of self, the more painful emotion that they will actually experience.
So the more you can actually bring people into flow states and bring people actually out of their default mode network
to stop self-attending, right, attending to other people or attending to their environment and their interaction with that,
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people's mood and affect becomes radically better. And so right now we're living in a Western society
that's just priming people towards self-awareness.
Is it priming people towards self-awareness? Or is it priming people towards constantly working?
I would say self-awareness rumination, right? That like, for example, all the beauty commercials,
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all the shampoo commercials are telling you, you are dirty, you need this product to clean yourself.
Commodification of the self. I mean, like, okay, so do you know the – I forgot if it was psychologist or psychiatrist.
The last name was Burns. And he focuses on this idea of like, should, like in changing, like these should is like a very negative thing.
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That person should – yeah, yeah. That person should drive better. I should go to school.
And it's not that it's a bad – it's not that like, oh, I should do, you know, eat better or something like that.
It's not that the should is wrong, like, oh, I should eat better. Yeah, maybe you probably should eat better.
But this idea that this mental capacity of saying I should is almost a waste of time,
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and it's rather trying to reframe to more I can.
Now, this is where Byung-Chul Han sort of questions the standard Western way of thinking,
because where he says that should is a negative or enforcement through negative.
If you go outside, he looks at can as a sort of panopticon of oppressiveness.
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You become a workhorse because you can, and you get entrapped by this.
And it is – the answer is the middle path in between the two.
It's so difficult because language is just such a bad translation, and the more people you start to read and the more – like, I've almost –
it's interesting because I listen to words that people say when they use to describe things,
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but I also assume that no word has a unifying definition.
So, it's like this really weird place that I exist in.
But this is where like theory of mind comes in.
Before you interpret any word that someone says to you, you're – one, if you're meeting them for the first time,
your brain, like, subconsciously has been scanning like a billion different markers on them, right?
But the point that I'm trying to make is that we interpret every word coming out of someone's mouth
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based off of our theory about them and our theory about their theory of everything, right?
So, like, when you tell me something, I'm going to be biased into interpreting that based off of my frame of reference format already.
And my frame of reference in my brain of like what I think your theory of everything is, is probably wrong
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because I don't know everything about you, so it's going to have oversimplifications of your theory of everything.
This is the reason why we make overgeneralizations of religious people.
All Christians think this way. All Muslims think this way, right?
Or even like ethnicities or cultures because these are cognitive heuristics.
But, okay, so stories. I mean, cognitive heuristics, right, are – what are they? Just like summaries.
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These are stories. Yeah, yeah. It's a fiction.
So, the answer, I think, or rather the question is like what do we do with this, right?
If we know that everything ultimately – the world runs on stories. It does not run on Duncan.
Duncan is a story.
A commodification.
And coffee is a narrative that we, you know, it also has physiological –
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It is a drug.
– effects as well.
You're all drug addicts.
Okay.
Don't kid yourself.
If everything is – or rather if all facts have to be interpreted through a hierarchy of values,
and that hierarchy is a story that we tell ourselves, it's a useful fiction,
then how do people like us who care deeply about the logos, who care deeply about trying to find like
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how does the world actually work? Like what is really going on?
How do we square that desire with also making society function?
Because it seems like evolution really doesn't select for truth-seeking.
It seems like that's like 10% of people.
Like we need like the really smart people to go into the ivory towers and like figure this shit out
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so that they can like make the rest of society better.
But the majority of society really does need just useful fictions to kind of get along.
I don't think there is a universal truth.
It's experienced at multiple different levels and there is no way to actually come to this truth.
But that to me is the universal truth.
Well, the universal truth is that there is relativistic truth.
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But that is a narrative universal truth.
Well, it's a snake eating its own tail.
The interaction exists and there's a million ways it exists.
So the way that I look is I try not to actually look for a truth beyond them,
but I'm more curious of every interaction.
I mean, of course I have biases. Everybody does.
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We're completely unknowing to them sometimes.
You know what I mean? I'm not Jesus. I'm not God. I'm not over all of these.
You know, nobody necessarily is.
Well, perhaps I am God, but perhaps all gods are that way.
But any which way, we are all just walking each other home.
And the best way, at least in the work that I do, is to meet every single person exactly where they're at.
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And to get into their story.
See their story.
Not get into it?
Understand it. Dance with it.
But to me, the best way is to put on the shoes and walk around in it.
Well, to dance with it.
Sure.
You play with it.
Yeah.
It's a bad translation of reality.
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I mean, so on my wall I have in 1 Corinthians, it says that to the Jew I become like the Jew. I practice the ceremonial law.
When I'm with the Gentile, I forsake the laws of the Jews.
And now I'm under the covenant of Christ where I have freedom to eat pork and whatever.
And then Paul says, and when I'm with the Greeks, I dispel from all of my religious terminology.
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And I actually tried to engage with them in a more philosophical premise as one who is like a boxer who is determined in his fight.
And so would you kind of say that that's what you're kind of arguing for?
You're kind of becoming all things to all men for some sort of noble aim.
I don't think there's any aim besides walking them home.
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But that is an aim.
How is it an aim? We're all going to die.
Okay, so even if you-
It's not having an aim.
Okay, hold up. Even if you think all these things are determined, I believe that, right?
But you still have to say that inside this deterministic universe, you are still exercising aims.
So-
You are walking them home.
When I go to France, I try to learn as much French as I possibly could.
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Speak it as properly as I could.
Practice their cultures as much as I possibly could to the point where everybody fully spoke to me in French
and a lot of it went way over my head.
But assuming everyone thought I was just European, is this essentially what you mean?
This sort of dancing with the culture? I did not become French. I was not French.
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But you tried your best to kind of acclimate to it.
I tried my best to dance with their culture.
To be-
To play with it.
To be ready to use your terms.
To learn from it.
To follow the path of least resistance.
You do not have any feel, like, I mean, I do not know.
Dancing with it is the best way that I could possibly say because-
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I do like the dance.
If-
Because I do believe that we are here to play.
I do believe that play is what we are doing.
I think, and perhaps I am, you know, here I am caught in exactly the humanistic response.
When I hear the word aim, you assume that on dancing it is like the point to aim and end up at that point on the floor.
No, no, no.
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The aim is simply just to dance in itself.
Yes, yes.
Language is really a poor translation.
It really is. Language is such a poor translation of what actually goes on.
I think, I forgot who said this, but I seriously think that art is the best interpretation of all of this.
And that somebody that can dabble in physics and philosophy and art really is the trying to understand all these experiences.
(31:35):
Well, if you have a high IQ, your Q factor, basically if it is high, it predicts that you will be higher in all the other 15 sub-domains of intelligence.
So, you are going to, you know, like, if you are a physicist, you are probably 150 or higher IQ and that trickles down into all other, you know, domains of intelligence.
(31:58):
I mean, but just because you are a physicist and perhaps have an high IQ doesn't mean you are going to be a person that does this sort of thing, you know.
I feel like there is very few people that do go into this area, you know.
Go into what area?
Like Aldous Huxley realm.
Sort of somebody that understands.
Well, I feel like Aldous Huxley was like a bridge builder.
Pontifus Minimus, I believe is what he called himself.
(32:19):
And he was looking for a Pontifax Minimus rather than a Pontifax Maximus.
Pontifax Maximus in Latin was the like ultimate bridge builder, directly a bridge builder.
That is the next kind of era in philosophy.
I feel like it is just like these dudes that are just not afraid to kind of synthesize in like a very high level.
(32:43):
And I think with like AI, the second we get AI inside of our cognition, so like large language models, how they work is they are basically able to find the statistical probability
between two tokens, two symbols, two words, and every single thing has a relationship that has a probability to it to kind of bring up like it is all just interactions, right?
But now once we increase our cognitive bandwidth, because our working memory sucks, it is literally seven plus or minus two digits.
(33:09):
Once we increase that with AI, you know, symbiosis, it is going to be mind blowing to be able to like look around at all these contradictions or like perceived contradictions in the world, right?
Like Christianity, like, okay, in philosophy, we have this law of non-contradiction that if I make premise one, the God of the Bible is the true God, right?
(33:30):
And then I say premise two, Muhammad is the true God.
That according to the law of non-contradiction does not work in your Eastern framework, maybe it does, but from a Western propositional perspective,
those contradict one another and therefore either one is right and one is wrong or they are both wrong.
But I think with AI and once we increase our bandwidth, maybe we are going to be able to see more interactions at a much higher level that kind of creates synthesis, if that is a word, creates a synthesis of all these phenomena.
(34:03):
I am not entirely, well first off, sorry to kind of do this, but Muhammad was the prophet, Allah is God?
Yes, yeah, I am sorry, no, no.
No, that is alright.
The Muslims are coming for me.
No, but to an extent, yes, but also no, because that is almost like extreme globalization, this almost unification, almost universalism.
(34:26):
No, no, okay, no, but here is the thing, universalism, I am sorry to interrupt you, is something that people like reduce, right?
I am not trying to be reductivistic, what is the term?
Yeah, but I am not doing that, what I am saying is that if we increase our cognitive bandwidth, we might get to a place where we can see things that we haven't seen before and understand the interactions and relationships of things that create a synthesis that is more nuanced than what we could possibly do right now with our computational limit.
(34:56):
This seems like trying to make what Aldous Hoxley called as an atopia, not a utopia, but an atopia.
Brave New World was a utopian society, Island was an atopian society.
It is a little bit difficult to go sort of like into exactly what he meant by atopia, but it is almost the fact that it goes against human nature to an extent because, say, let me take two religious groups, let me take Shia Muslims and Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.
(35:29):
Wahhabis want to cut the heads off of Shia Muslims.
They are wrong.
That is very human.
And no matter how much Sam Smith speaks out against, say, jihadism or something like this, ignore that.
Wait, Sam Smith.
Sam Harris, that was really funny.
Sam Harris, Sam Smith.
I am sorry, it has been a long day.
I am seeing Sam Smith saying jihadism is wrong.
(35:55):
And then proceeding to sing.
Sam Smith does have a good voice, but beyond that, Sam Harris, you know, like, it is so human that this occurs.
What is human?
The fact that Wahhabis want to cut off Shia's heads.
That is human.
(36:16):
That is very human.
Well, I would say primitive.
I would not say primitive.
I would say it is human.
Oh, okay.
We do have the capacity for that.
Everyone has the capacity for everything.
Yes, yeah.
I know we have spoke about this before.
These stories, it does not matter which religion it is.
It does not matter which belief system it is.
(36:38):
But yet we have created society and socialization that decreases this violence dramatically.
And this is what Stephen Pinker writes, and better angels of our nature.
And I know you have qualms, but I think on the violence topic, I think you cannot dispute those.
I think violence is taking on new forms, but physical violence and murder, I think, radically decrease.
(37:03):
Look at the stats, bro.
I am the West, bro.
Proposition.
I got you a graft, brother.
We are going to coup d'etat every country until violence goes away.
We are going to start blackbagging people and flying them off into the middle of nowhere.
Well, you ready? That is at least the narrative that I have put my faith in.
And that is how I orient the facts that I interpret in the world.
(37:27):
But you want to wrap this pot up.
I am just like, what do you see in regards to story and narrative?
I think story and narratives are very useful.
I think something you said spot on at the beginning with the kid wants to go to sleep listening to a story and not the periodic table.
It is something that is so true because when I am feeling burnt out, when I am needing to learn something,
(37:52):
when I am looking for something in life, I almost, when I am looking for something, I don't go to a philosophy book.
I go to some sort of fiction to read.
And I don't look for answers.
I just experience that fiction.
Because it stirs emotion.
You are right.
It stirs something so human in us that sometimes often because of this, I come to with this story.
(38:16):
And the story is something that is guiding and something that is enlightening.
And sometimes it is just something that is appeasing.
I think stories are brilliant and useful, but don't be drunk on them.
Yes, don't be drunk on symbols, Cain and Abel.
And also to counter that, do not count the amount of time somebody says something.
(38:43):
Exactly 385 times.
God bless their souls, man.
That was hysterical.
That was hysterical.
I am going to chop in that clip into this.
Right now the clip is going to play.
There are 356 references to Cain in the book and 20 references to the descendants of Cain.
(39:04):
Dr. Peterson, you are drunk on symbols.
You are obsessed with Cain.
That would be brilliant.
That scene right there is going to live with me forever.
Dude, Alex O'Connor was holding the bag.
He was holding the last bag so hard.
He was like, no way this man said that.
I counted up in your book.
That was the most Richard Dawkins thing ever.
TGI, the global island.
(00:04):
Today we dig into the importance of stories.
We break down Dr. Jordan Peterson's quote that you can't interpret facts without a
narrative, an orientation structure, a frame of reference.
Matt details why Jordan is missing out on the East and how Hinduism and Buddhism can
actually shape this same argument.
We end this episode talking about the symbiosis with artificial intelligence and what that
(00:25):
means for the future of philosophy.
But for now, Jordan Peterson's lecture at Harvard University.
I find this extremely interesting and the reason for this is because as soon as you
know, as soon as you know that we use stories to regulate our emotions, and as soon as you
know that there are two types of information that we need to gather, one being factual
information and the other information about how we should behave, then you have the possibility
(00:48):
of reading mythological accounts or stories in general from a completely different perspective
because you don't have to think anymore, well, this mythological account, for example, the
creation of the world has no relationship whatsoever to the evolutionary theory.
We know evolutionary theory is more accurate, therefore this whole sequence of accounts
has to be cast into the realm of pseudoscience or superstition.
And then you lose all the information that's in those stories.
(01:09):
As soon as you know that those stories aren't concerned in the least with the construction
of the world, but are concerned with the world as it has significance, well then you have
a whole new way of approaching them, a whole new way of interpreting them, and you can
start to understand the nature of the stories that's actually on their lighter culture.
And believe me, that's so useful.
Well, it's so useful, you can hardly believe it.
You find all of a sudden that all these stories that you've heard since your earliest days,
(01:33):
stories that are basically rationally incomprehensible, as soon as you twist your pre-subpositions
about their origins just 45 degrees, then you can see the order in them exactly what
it is that they're trying to put forth, and they all of a sudden make sense.
That was a clip from Dr. Jordan Peterson's Mass and Meaning Lecture at Harvard.
Jordan has argued, I think throughout his whole career, there's a world of facts, and
(01:54):
then there's a world of narratives, right?
The world of narratives, he believes religion is like the biggest mechanism by which narratives
are produced and kind of transmitted throughout time.
They tell us how to behave in the world, and the world of facts, which is a novel thing,
like Jordan argues that the Scientific Revolution is only really 500 years, and so our rational
discourse in the evolutionary time span is such a blink of the eye.
(02:19):
He argues that the world of facts has to do with what is in the objective material world,
but the world of narrative has to do with how we ought to behave in the world.
We can kind of tease that out.
Then the kind of quote I want to talk to you about today that Jordan argues is that we
cannot interpret the world solely through facts.
Every single fact has to be interpreted through a hierarchy of value and through a narrative.
(02:44):
And so I kind of want to pull your mind on that one.
You know, it's really funny, like, not to get off topic, I'm so surprised he didn't
study Hinduism earlier because it is just a juicy book.
The Mahabharana, or however you say it, is like this thick.
It's literally like nearly the size of my forearm, like in the length of just stories
(03:07):
of gods and people and, you know, princes and everything working with one another.
And this is one of the things that is so guiding of, you know, Indian culture.
And you're right that these stories, some of these stories are believed at their religious
sense and some are very philosophically studied.
I mean, everybody knows the Bhagavad Gita, the whole story of Krishna and Arjuna, and
(03:30):
this story is interpreted in so many different ways.
And those are the oldest stories, those are the oldest religious texts that we have available.
Absolutely.
I mean, I believe they are.
Yeah.
Yeah, I definitely believe they are.
I mean, anything that we have recorded, I know we have, what is it now, Gobekli Tepe
in southern Turkey that there is evidence of civilization and possible, you know, religious
(03:55):
structures that goes back, I don't even remember now.
I want to pull up on this concept of story.
Okay.
And one of the things that he argues in that video that we use stories to regulate our
emotion, right?
And so what Jordan argues is he says this often that our worldview is like a raft in
an ocean of suffering.
And that ocean is this like nihilistic, existential dread, right?
(04:17):
Of like just not having any sort of orientation in the world.
And the thing that's holding us, that's buffering us from being in an existential crisis is
our worldview raft.
What he argues is that stories play into that raft and allow us to kind of regulate our
emotions.
So let me give you an example, right?
The world can become very chaotic very quickly as you're growing up and there's so many contradictions
(04:40):
all over the place.
And so one way to kind of simplify and to give yourself an orientation is we tell little
kids bedtime stories, right?
And our nervous system is actually primed to be more interested in learning the story
than learning the periodic table of elements.
No kid wants to be shown the periodic table of elements before they go to bed.
Maybe a few really smart type A children, but the average child wants to hear about
(05:03):
David and Goliath, right?
And there's some sort of embedded moral narrative inside of that story that has facts, but those
facts are less important.
It's the actual like implicit moral story that tells us how we ought to behave without
being preachy.
It's basically like a meme.
It's a transmission of information implicitly.
(05:24):
Well, it's a fiction.
Like as a man-
A useful fiction, yes.
Well, no, it's not.
See, it's funny because immediately I say fiction and you have to say it's a useful
fiction.
Because fiction has like a negative rapture.
Fiction does have like, you know, not to get all postmodernist, but it's like a word-
In a rational world, fiction has a negative connotation.
But it does.
I mean, so when we're looking at it from a man, well, Kant, you have to look through
(05:47):
his dictionary, focus on the word fiction.
I think Hans Weihanger did a much better job sort of elaborating on this.
A fiction is essentially a story or not even just a story, actually something that may
exist but does not actually exist.
For example, when Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, this capitalistic idea was actually
(06:11):
completely fictitious worlds.
Now, in reality, it's served a lot of benefit and there's a lot of issue with it as well.
But, you know, in reality, it became- it is a fiction.
There is nothing real actually behind the story of capitalism or now neoliberal belief.
I don't even want to call this capitalism.
(06:32):
So, these fictions can be applied at both, like you said, like that metanarrative level,
but also as a level of how we actually live and interact like within our lives.
Let's break that down, okay?
So, like, let's talk about the nature of existence in like a materialistic world, right?
(06:53):
Do you think SpongeBob exists?
In my best Canadian accent, I want to say, well, what do you mean by exist?
Does SpongeBob exist?
I mean, do those whom experience understand SpongeBob and the concept of SpongeBob, then yes,
yes, SpongeBob does exist within the culture and exists throughout generations
(07:17):
and is a unifying thing throughout generations from late millennials till the current gen alpha.
Everybody knows SpongeBob.
So, it does exist in the narrative.
Sure. Okay. So, you're answering from a much more, I would say, like religious perspective
and much more kind of maybe like sociological.
I would say that right now in our like materialistic postmodern world,
(07:42):
if you are consistent with that philosophy, you have to say that SpongeBob is nothing more
than photons on a wall, on a TV screen that are, you know, coming into our eyes
and then being processed by our, you know, neural cortex.
And then, you know, that information is then being transmitted via, you know, dialogue and storytelling
(08:07):
or like books or whatever.
But this is where I think I became much more convinced that there's a world that is in the objective world
that isn't material.
And this is really the mystery of consciousness.
Our greatest scientists do not know what the hell consciousness is,
nor do we know where thoughts are happening.
I can literally like, I can go to Albert Einstein's brain and I can try to, you know, dig in there
(08:32):
and nowhere will I find equals MC squared, right?
None of the neurons are going to have it written down.
And so, it's like where the hell are these thoughts actually taking place?
And so, the subjective phenomenological experience that I'm having thoughts is so real.
Like right now, like I'm just thinking of an elephant, right?
And I bet, you know, the listener probably thought of an elephant as I said,
(08:54):
primed their brain, maybe you did as well.
It's like where the hell is that elephant?
Where is that elephant actually existing?
And for us to just materialistically say that that elephant doesn't exist, I think would be foolish.
And so, going back to like, does SpongeBob exist, I think that there is a world of like semantics
and there's like a world of thoughts and things that exist in this other domain
(09:19):
that we have yet to kind of create a science about that I think do exist.
And I think the religious people are the ones who have picked up on it.
Like when they say you're possessed by a spirit, right?
Like I believe that kindness could be a spirit that could actually possess you.
And when you come around a person who's like extremely kind and you're like,
and like you spend a lot of time with a lot of more like cynical people,
(09:41):
that sort of persona becomes contagious, right?
And it's like, it's almost like a spirit of kindness kind of possesses you
and then primes your behavior going forward to be more kind.
Listen to you say all that. What I really took away from it is that existence kind of comes from interaction.
And there's insanely different levels of interaction.
(10:03):
There's immediate interaction like we're doing.
There's interaction of me touching a keyboard and you know, producing sound.
And then there's interaction of stories to different people's brains.
And I don't think there's anything ever that's going to be universal about it besides the fact that
the only thing that may be universal to humans is simply the fact that they are humans.
And if, and they interact with things, that's one of...
(10:29):
So do you think that like consciousness is just the interacting of minds?
I think it's the intersection of minds.
What does that mean?
Indra's net.
I think I explained it.
You've brought it up in the past. Can you elaborate on it?
All we are is the entirety of existence, the idea that we are just the big bang experiencing itself.
(10:52):
We, consciousness, our experience as humans is nothing that's actually special as compared to say a chicken or a rock.
It's simply just is that we experience things.
We can be aware of the experience of things.
We can interact with things in different levels.
(11:13):
These interactions create what we call consciousness or experience.
I'm still not getting a clear definition of interaction.
Interaction is everything.
It's yin and yang.
It's yin and yang.
You can't not interact with anything.
One of my qualms with the East, I just feel like the East is qualms everything.
(11:36):
Well, this isn't necessarily just the East.
I know. I do think that the West is really good at singling things out and specifying.
The East just goes, everything is.
It is.
But why does every definition from you, it's always wrapped up in the bow of, well, everything is actually just this one, everything is.
(11:58):
Because it is. How is it not?
It does seem, okay, once again, like I said to you, from my meditative practice, I have sympathy towards the propositions that you're laying forth.
But from my scientific rational mind, my snake oil salesman, a bell goes off in the brain, you're making so many jumps here.
(12:19):
You're not really showing A to B, B to C, unlike your deductive reasoning.
But it doesn't necessarily exist.
So, for example, say I go to different religious facilities, which I have in the past, I haven't had the time to recently, right?
I go to a mosque, I go to a temple, see what Jews believe, see what Muslims believe, see what, you know, Sufis believe, see what Christians believe, Protestants, Pentecostals, whatever it may be.
(12:45):
These are the interactions that are non-universal.
This is why I don't believe there can ever be a universal religion.
But religions speak to certain people and it's through the interactions that they have in their life, through their understanding.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
I'm getting a little bit better.
Okay, so let me give you an example and you tell me if I'm on the right track.
So like a Jiyin environment relationship interaction, there is no such thing as a good Jiyin, there's only a good Jiyin environment relationship.
(13:09):
Yeah, you're right.
Sapolsky's way is a good way of understanding this.
Okay, so now I'm getting a better, you know, grab on this.
So you're focusing on not the actual material A and B, but the relationship between A and B and how that is something unique in and of itself that is a phenomenon, that is not material, but it still exists.
(13:31):
Exactly.
The relationship, the interaction.
We all experience, it doesn't matter which religion you are, it doesn't matter which fiction or which story you believe in, whether it's David and Goliath or Buddha or, you know, or Muhammad.
It really doesn't matter which story, which fiction, you know, to not, you know, upset the religious folks to say capitalism, communism, which, you know, fiction you believe in, which way to live your life.
(13:58):
Well, it doesn't matter from your perspective.
It does, but it doesn't.
So explain.
When you're a human, you have the human experience.
We all do.
There is that psychological, the phenomenal experience that we experience life through the human eyes.
Sometimes you call it the ego, sometimes the psychoanalytic self, you know, there's so many different ways to actually call it.
(14:23):
You know, I think Carl Jung was such a great psychologist because I was listening to a speech that he, a talk that he was giving on death, and he was saying, you know, I choose, you know, I don't have to believe something that there is no evidence in, but I do not discount it.
Simply because there is no like full evidence when discussing death.
(14:44):
You need evidence to also disprove something.
Yeah.
I mean, this is where I like really appreciated Jung's opinion.
I guess you could say Jung's fiction on death was one that was both completely ground in science.
But also open minded.
Exactly.
But also where it wasn't drowned by science.
Sure.
You understand what I'm saying?
(15:06):
Yeah, well, okay, well, this goes to a term that I have been using every single day for the past two weeks, thanks to you and Jachubi T, methodological pluralism.
I think if there's one term that probably should sum up our podcast, it's probably that one.
Methodological pluralism.
And it's not a term that I've heard often, but I very much appreciate it. And I think it's kind of this next maybe philosophical era that we're in.
(15:36):
I think it kind of did, like in this postmodern era where everything is relativistic and nothing is greater than anything else because they all just are narratives.
This is where I think the next kind of philosophical era is what Peterson argues.
Yes, everything is narratives, but there's also a hierarchy of values that puts into line different narratives the same way that it would put into line different facts.
(16:03):
I mean, yes.
It's like a meta narrative.
Yes, and certain people do experience these narratives, question them, think about them, you know, people like you and I.
But that to me is the meta cognition.
Same, elaborate.
Okay, so meta cognition is just thinking about thinking.
So instead of – so like look, most people when they are growing up religious, they're not really critically thinking about their religion.
(16:26):
They're just behaving in the world as they're being conditioned to behave.
And for them, as you said, for many people, they find in their unique interactions, they find their useful fictions.
We all do, right? Our worldview, protecting us, right?
And then there's this like next level of maturity where people start to actually question their orientation.
(16:47):
Not their sexual orientation, but for some they do.
But they start questioning their frames of reference, right?
And this is where Jordan talks about Nietzsche.
Nietzsche talks about now what happens if, let's say for me, right, I grew up fundamentalist Christian.
Now I leave that frame of reference and I go, wow, I can't believe I believe that.
(17:08):
And now let's say I'm like a materialistic atheist.
And then all of a sudden, I'm learning about consciousness and I'm like, wait, this does not square with my materialism at all.
So then I leave materialist atheist.
And now I'm just like, okay, so two of my frames of reference that I had so much faith in thinking that these were the correct orientations of the world were disproven to me.
(17:29):
Who says that the one that I'm holding onto right now is going to be correct?
Because it's probably not going to be.
And this is where Nietzsche argues that you lose faith not in just one frame of reference, but all frames of reference.
And this is where, you know, Nietzsche argues that people fall into nihilism.
Nietzsche completely failed because he didn't understand the East at all.
(17:50):
Seriously, no, this is where the Kyoto School really comes in, where Nishikani really like offers the Buddhist middle way.
Nietzsche is so focused on the boat that the Buddhist method, what Siddhartha Gotima essentially discovered,
and you could even say to a further extent what Marcus Aurelius in Stoicism sort of was dabbling with is this idea that that boat is actually slight.
(18:24):
That is the fiction.
It does not actually need to be this way.
To reach towards the steps of enlightenment, you need to give up the boat.
Okay, let me give you a parable that Sam Harris has talked about that I think is adjacent to this.
He talks about this man who was a famous monk, right, and he gets shot in the heart from an archery man that accidentally shoots him, right?
(18:52):
And the archer runs up and instead of noticing that the man is bleeding out because he shot him with a bow,
he just gets so overwhelmed that he's meeting his celebrity crush, if you would, and he's like,
can I take a photo with you? Can I get your autograph?
And this guy's bleeding out and the archer who shot him is just so preoccupied by his attention to the fact that he's meeting his celebrity
(19:17):
that he is not focusing on the most important and significant and relevant thing, which is that this man is bleeding out and he needs help.
And so what Sam argues is that if you think that the world is just about propositions and just about knowledge,
you're missing the other side of the coin, which is attention.
And if we're training people solely in knowledge, we are missing out on training them also in attention.
(19:41):
And it's not solely about knowledge, it's about the awareness and the movement of attention to say what is most relevant.
So going back to the boat narrative that you were bringing up, right, how you said we were clinging so strongly to that boat.
Most people who are doing that are not aware that they are because they haven't practiced phenomenological attention moving, right?
They haven't practiced metacognition.
(20:03):
And it's those things that the Eves have been doing for countless years that makes them the scholars on it,
where the West, which is so propositionalized, has a way to learn that.
Absolutely. I think two great scholars on this are from Japan, Nishikami from the Kyoto School,
and from I believe it's South Korean and German, Byung-cho Han. I don't know if you've heard of him before.
(20:26):
No.
It's annoying because there's definitely these like edgelords online that like to go towards these guys
because they almost seem very like in line with say Franz Kafka, and it seems very nihilistic,
but it's not. It's a misconception that it would be nihilistic.
Instead, they focus on where you were saying like, okay, the search for knowledge and you need to focus on attention.
(20:52):
Byung-cho Han wrote this book, The Burnout Society, focusing on how in our neoliberal society,
there's this complete, the fiction of our neoliberal society, it almost incentivizes individualism and narcissism
to the point that we are always burnt out and that everything's commodified to our identities and our way of being.
(21:18):
And he's interesting because he doesn't just, this is where the Western nihilists, you know, the edgelords are wrong,
because he turns around and says, well, you do know how I combat this. I sit in silence, I garden,
and I forgot his other thing. Maybe it was read like something, you know what I mean?
It was essentially taking away that you, you know, in the past, you used to work physically,
(21:44):
and then you would rest and you would actually be physically rested, but now we work mentally,
and we're never actually mentally rested, so our attention can never actually function, if you'd say.
Yes, full agreement with that. Not just about like the cognitive labor that we're doing,
that we're not even realizing we're doing much more cognitive labor, but I think it's also, as you point out,
(22:06):
the individualistic and hyper-focus on the concept of self, this illusion that the East kind of has practices
that allow us to kind of dispel of the sense of self. The crazy thing is that the statisticians in psychology,
when they were kind of mapping out all negative emotion terms, the one that was basically adjacent to all of them,
that can kind of summarize them, was self-awareness, that all painful emotion is actually correlated with more self-awareness.
(22:33):
And so the more time that people are being primed and conditioned to be in a state of their default mode network,
of just rummining on their concept of self, the more painful emotion that they will actually experience.
So the more you can actually bring people into flow states and bring people actually out of their default mode network
to stop self-attending, right, attending to other people or attending to their environment and their interaction with that,
(23:02):
people's mood and affect becomes radically better. And so right now we're living in a Western society
that's just priming people towards self-awareness.
Is it priming people towards self-awareness? Or is it priming people towards constantly working?
I would say self-awareness rumination, right? That like, for example, all the beauty commercials,
(23:23):
all the shampoo commercials are telling you, you are dirty, you need this product to clean yourself.
Commodification of the self. I mean, like, okay, so do you know the – I forgot if it was psychologist or psychiatrist.
The last name was Burns. And he focuses on this idea of like, should, like in changing, like these should is like a very negative thing.
(23:45):
That person should – yeah, yeah. That person should drive better. I should go to school.
And it's not that it's a bad – it's not that like, oh, I should do, you know, eat better or something like that.
It's not that the should is wrong, like, oh, I should eat better. Yeah, maybe you probably should eat better.
But this idea that this mental capacity of saying I should is almost a waste of time,
(24:11):
and it's rather trying to reframe to more I can.
Now, this is where Byung-Chul Han sort of questions the standard Western way of thinking,
because where he says that should is a negative or enforcement through negative.
If you go outside, he looks at can as a sort of panopticon of oppressiveness.
(24:33):
You become a workhorse because you can, and you get entrapped by this.
And it is – the answer is the middle path in between the two.
It's so difficult because language is just such a bad translation, and the more people you start to read and the more – like, I've almost –
it's interesting because I listen to words that people say when they use to describe things,
(24:56):
but I also assume that no word has a unifying definition.
So, it's like this really weird place that I exist in.
But this is where like theory of mind comes in.
Before you interpret any word that someone says to you, you're – one, if you're meeting them for the first time,
your brain, like, subconsciously has been scanning like a billion different markers on them, right?
But the point that I'm trying to make is that we interpret every word coming out of someone's mouth
(25:21):
based off of our theory about them and our theory about their theory of everything, right?
So, like, when you tell me something, I'm going to be biased into interpreting that based off of my frame of reference format already.
And my frame of reference in my brain of like what I think your theory of everything is, is probably wrong
(25:42):
because I don't know everything about you, so it's going to have oversimplifications of your theory of everything.
This is the reason why we make overgeneralizations of religious people.
All Christians think this way. All Muslims think this way, right?
Or even like ethnicities or cultures because these are cognitive heuristics.
But, okay, so stories. I mean, cognitive heuristics, right, are – what are they? Just like summaries.
(26:07):
These are stories. Yeah, yeah. It's a fiction.
So, the answer, I think, or rather the question is like what do we do with this, right?
If we know that everything ultimately – the world runs on stories. It does not run on Duncan.
Duncan is a story.
A commodification.
And coffee is a narrative that we, you know, it also has physiological –
(26:31):
It is a drug.
– effects as well.
You're all drug addicts.
Okay.
Don't kid yourself.
If everything is – or rather if all facts have to be interpreted through a hierarchy of values,
and that hierarchy is a story that we tell ourselves, it's a useful fiction,
then how do people like us who care deeply about the logos, who care deeply about trying to find like
(26:53):
how does the world actually work? Like what is really going on?
How do we square that desire with also making society function?
Because it seems like evolution really doesn't select for truth-seeking.
It seems like that's like 10% of people.
Like we need like the really smart people to go into the ivory towers and like figure this shit out
(27:18):
so that they can like make the rest of society better.
But the majority of society really does need just useful fictions to kind of get along.
I don't think there is a universal truth.
It's experienced at multiple different levels and there is no way to actually come to this truth.
But that to me is the universal truth.
Well, the universal truth is that there is relativistic truth.
(27:42):
But that is a narrative universal truth.
Well, it's a snake eating its own tail.
The interaction exists and there's a million ways it exists.
So the way that I look is I try not to actually look for a truth beyond them,
but I'm more curious of every interaction.
I mean, of course I have biases. Everybody does.
(28:03):
We're completely unknowing to them sometimes.
You know what I mean? I'm not Jesus. I'm not God. I'm not over all of these.
You know, nobody necessarily is.
Well, perhaps I am God, but perhaps all gods are that way.
But any which way, we are all just walking each other home.
And the best way, at least in the work that I do, is to meet every single person exactly where they're at.
(28:26):
And to get into their story.
See their story.
Not get into it?
Understand it. Dance with it.
But to me, the best way is to put on the shoes and walk around in it.
Well, to dance with it.
Sure.
You play with it.
Yeah.
It's a bad translation of reality.
(28:49):
I mean, so on my wall I have in 1 Corinthians, it says that to the Jew I become like the Jew. I practice the ceremonial law.
When I'm with the Gentile, I forsake the laws of the Jews.
And now I'm under the covenant of Christ where I have freedom to eat pork and whatever.
And then Paul says, and when I'm with the Greeks, I dispel from all of my religious terminology.
(29:13):
And I actually tried to engage with them in a more philosophical premise as one who is like a boxer who is determined in his fight.
And so would you kind of say that that's what you're kind of arguing for?
You're kind of becoming all things to all men for some sort of noble aim.
I don't think there's any aim besides walking them home.
(29:34):
But that is an aim.
How is it an aim? We're all going to die.
Okay, so even if you-
It's not having an aim.
Okay, hold up. Even if you think all these things are determined, I believe that, right?
But you still have to say that inside this deterministic universe, you are still exercising aims.
So-
You are walking them home.
When I go to France, I try to learn as much French as I possibly could.
(30:00):
Speak it as properly as I could.
Practice their cultures as much as I possibly could to the point where everybody fully spoke to me in French
and a lot of it went way over my head.
But assuming everyone thought I was just European, is this essentially what you mean?
This sort of dancing with the culture? I did not become French. I was not French.
(30:22):
But you tried your best to kind of acclimate to it.
I tried my best to dance with their culture.
To be-
To play with it.
To be ready to use your terms.
To learn from it.
To follow the path of least resistance.
You do not have any feel, like, I mean, I do not know.
Dancing with it is the best way that I could possibly say because-
(30:45):
I do like the dance.
If-
Because I do believe that we are here to play.
I do believe that play is what we are doing.
I think, and perhaps I am, you know, here I am caught in exactly the humanistic response.
When I hear the word aim, you assume that on dancing it is like the point to aim and end up at that point on the floor.
No, no, no.
(31:06):
The aim is simply just to dance in itself.
Yes, yes.
Language is really a poor translation.
It really is. Language is such a poor translation of what actually goes on.
I think, I forgot who said this, but I seriously think that art is the best interpretation of all of this.
And that somebody that can dabble in physics and philosophy and art really is the trying to understand all these experiences.
(31:35):
Well, if you have a high IQ, your Q factor, basically if it is high, it predicts that you will be higher in all the other 15 sub-domains of intelligence.
So, you are going to, you know, like, if you are a physicist, you are probably 150 or higher IQ and that trickles down into all other, you know, domains of intelligence.
(31:58):
I mean, but just because you are a physicist and perhaps have an high IQ doesn't mean you are going to be a person that does this sort of thing, you know.
I feel like there is very few people that do go into this area, you know.
Go into what area?
Like Aldous Huxley realm.
Sort of somebody that understands.
Well, I feel like Aldous Huxley was like a bridge builder.
Pontifus Minimus, I believe is what he called himself.
(32:19):
And he was looking for a Pontifax Minimus rather than a Pontifax Maximus.
Pontifax Maximus in Latin was the like ultimate bridge builder, directly a bridge builder.
That is the next kind of era in philosophy.
I feel like it is just like these dudes that are just not afraid to kind of synthesize in like a very high level.
(32:43):
And I think with like AI, the second we get AI inside of our cognition, so like large language models, how they work is they are basically able to find the statistical probability
between two tokens, two symbols, two words, and every single thing has a relationship that has a probability to it to kind of bring up like it is all just interactions, right?
But now once we increase our cognitive bandwidth, because our working memory sucks, it is literally seven plus or minus two digits.
(33:09):
Once we increase that with AI, you know, symbiosis, it is going to be mind blowing to be able to like look around at all these contradictions or like perceived contradictions in the world, right?
Like Christianity, like, okay, in philosophy, we have this law of non-contradiction that if I make premise one, the God of the Bible is the true God, right?
(33:30):
And then I say premise two, Muhammad is the true God.
That according to the law of non-contradiction does not work in your Eastern framework, maybe it does, but from a Western propositional perspective,
those contradict one another and therefore either one is right and one is wrong or they are both wrong.
But I think with AI and once we increase our bandwidth, maybe we are going to be able to see more interactions at a much higher level that kind of creates synthesis, if that is a word, creates a synthesis of all these phenomena.
(34:03):
I am not entirely, well first off, sorry to kind of do this, but Muhammad was the prophet, Allah is God?
Yes, yeah, I am sorry, no, no.
No, that is alright.
The Muslims are coming for me.
No, but to an extent, yes, but also no, because that is almost like extreme globalization, this almost unification, almost universalism.
(34:26):
No, no, okay, no, but here is the thing, universalism, I am sorry to interrupt you, is something that people like reduce, right?
I am not trying to be reductivistic, what is the term?
Yeah, but I am not doing that, what I am saying is that if we increase our cognitive bandwidth, we might get to a place where we can see things that we haven't seen before and understand the interactions and relationships of things that create a synthesis that is more nuanced than what we could possibly do right now with our computational limit.
(34:56):
This seems like trying to make what Aldous Hoxley called as an atopia, not a utopia, but an atopia.
Brave New World was a utopian society, Island was an atopian society.
It is a little bit difficult to go sort of like into exactly what he meant by atopia, but it is almost the fact that it goes against human nature to an extent because, say, let me take two religious groups, let me take Shia Muslims and Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.
(35:29):
Wahhabis want to cut the heads off of Shia Muslims.
They are wrong.
That is very human.
And no matter how much Sam Smith speaks out against, say, jihadism or something like this, ignore that.
Wait, Sam Smith.
Sam Harris, that was really funny.
Sam Harris, Sam Smith.
I am sorry, it has been a long day.
I am seeing Sam Smith saying jihadism is wrong.
(35:55):
And then proceeding to sing.
Sam Smith does have a good voice, but beyond that, Sam Harris, you know, like, it is so human that this occurs.
What is human?
The fact that Wahhabis want to cut off Shia's heads.
That is human.
(36:16):
That is very human.
Well, I would say primitive.
I would not say primitive.
I would say it is human.
Oh, okay.
We do have the capacity for that.
Everyone has the capacity for everything.
Yes, yeah.
I know we have spoke about this before.
These stories, it does not matter which religion it is.
It does not matter which belief system it is.
(36:38):
But yet we have created society and socialization that decreases this violence dramatically.
And this is what Stephen Pinker writes, and better angels of our nature.
And I know you have qualms, but I think on the violence topic, I think you cannot dispute those.
I think violence is taking on new forms, but physical violence and murder, I think, radically decrease.
(37:03):
Look at the stats, bro.
I am the West, bro.
Proposition.
I got you a graft, brother.
We are going to coup d'etat every country until violence goes away.
We are going to start blackbagging people and flying them off into the middle of nowhere.
Well, you ready? That is at least the narrative that I have put my faith in.
And that is how I orient the facts that I interpret in the world.
(37:27):
But you want to wrap this pot up.
I am just like, what do you see in regards to story and narrative?
I think story and narratives are very useful.
I think something you said spot on at the beginning with the kid wants to go to sleep listening to a story and not the periodic table.
It is something that is so true because when I am feeling burnt out, when I am needing to learn something,
(37:52):
when I am looking for something in life, I almost, when I am looking for something, I don't go to a philosophy book.
I go to some sort of fiction to read.
And I don't look for answers.
I just experience that fiction.
Because it stirs emotion.
You are right.
It stirs something so human in us that sometimes often because of this, I come to with this story.
(38:16):
And the story is something that is guiding and something that is enlightening.
And sometimes it is just something that is appeasing.
I think stories are brilliant and useful, but don't be drunk on them.
Yes, don't be drunk on symbols, Cain and Abel.
And also to counter that, do not count the amount of time somebody says something.
(38:43):
Exactly 385 times.
God bless their souls, man.
That was hysterical.
That was hysterical.
I am going to chop in that clip into this.
Right now the clip is going to play.
There are 356 references to Cain in the book and 20 references to the descendants of Cain.
(39:04):
Dr. Peterson, you are drunk on symbols.
You are obsessed with Cain.
That would be brilliant.
That scene right there is going to live with me forever.
Dude, Alex O'Connor was holding the bag.
He was holding the last bag so hard.
He was like, no way this man said that.
I counted up in your book.
That was the most Richard Dawkins thing ever.
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