https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RvovxybQrNU
Well, maybe we can we can actually start there then because I think one of the biggest effects that your book has had and your influence has been to reverse the hierarchy of what is primordial in terms of what it is to be human and what it is to have a human experience. In some ways it kind of overturns the reductive scientific vision that we’ve lived with on and off, I guess, since the Enlightenment. There’s a competition, it seems, between different visions, but definitely that’s the one that seems to have pervaded popular culture, you know, this kind of reductive aspect idea that we are almost just machines basically, you know, soft machines or something like that, but you really have been able to bring about the primacy of consciousness and the embedded experience as being something you constantly emphasize the notion of context and how things are interrelated of things and that is how we actually experience the richest part of our experiences in that. So maybe you can start a little bit with that and we can move on to the art and culture a bit afterwards. Absolutely, we can start anywhere and go anywhere that you like. I mean, of course, it’s very nice of you to say that I’ve affected some sort of a shift, but of course I’m just part of a lot of people who’ve got rather tired of being served up this incredibly simple-minded idea, the reductionist materialist position, and so I’m very glad to be part of a movement for something a bit more sophisticated and more likely to be true. But you touch there on the very important point of context because it seems to me that context is everything. It completely changes the meaning of what one’s dealing with. The context of a word alone can make it mean something quite different, but all the things that are really most powerful for us, things like the sense of the divine, of nature, of love, poetry, music, and the rest can’t easily be just made into explicit sentences in prose. The only way we can approach them using language seems to me to be obliquely. Definitely, and the way that I like to approach it is there is a sense in which analogy is the basic mechanism by which we understand or by which we engage with the world. So analogy has this play between identity and difference. There’s this constant play where you see the pattern, but you also notice the difference. Dionysus, the Areopagite, really talks about analogy as he pulls it into God, into these two extremes of complete apophatic difference, but then also fullness of participation, you could say. And so you use the word metaphorical, at least in the book that I read, you tend to use the word metaphor in terms of that process. Yes, I think it’s a reasonable one because the metaphor is which one is saying something like he is a lion, and interestingly it depends on the fact that he’s not a lion. If he was, it would be a very Bernard Remy. But the whole point of a metaphor is that you are bringing together two things that are simultaneously true in one way and not true in another. And I would entirely agree that metaphors or models, and models are just sort of more elaborated metaphors, govern how we think about things and are behind what we mean when we say, oh, I understand that, including in science. So when people say they understand something, I think what this means is that they can approximate it in their minds to something else that they already know and think that they can believe. So it’s really always an analogy, as it were, but the analogy is interesting because of the difference as well. And what I particularly am concerned about is that when one uses a model such as a machine to liken anything, you make it look machine-like. Only the bits that correspond to a machine stand out, and all the rest retires into the dark, into the penumbra. But those are the things we really need to be attending to. Otherwise, all we do see is the confirmation of our own model. Thank you.