https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mSv1bjaORlA
I remember hearing recently a podcast with Sam Harrison and he was talking about he said something like, when you drink water, it doesn’t matter what you think, you’re always drinking H2O. I’m like, that’s not true. No one drinks H2O. We drink wet, we drink cold, we drink warm, we drink flavors. Refreshing. That has nothing to do with – I mean, it has not completely nothing to do, but the category of two, you know, hydrogen and it’s like, it’s not, it’s not the same as the categories of experience. Yeah. So the only problem with that, I guess, is that people will think that it makes it arbitrary, which it doesn’t, because there’s still universal experiences that all humans have. It doesn’t mean it, because it’s interpreted through the lens of our consciousness, it doesn’t mean that it’s arbitrary in the sense that every, anybody could say whatever they want can interpret it however they want. So that’s the only problem with the idea of bringing it back to your experience. I agree with that’s what people have to do, but they have to keep in mind that the human experience is a universal experience. Some things are universal in the human experience. We all eat, we all sleep, we all work, we all rest, etc., etc. So the human experience is not random or arbitrary, it’s universal. And in a way it’s funny because to get to true symbolism, you almost have to go, you almost have to destroy what people usually think what it is to give meaning to something. It’s like you have to go beyond the emotional or personal, you know, version of what happens and then go back to the really basic, basic ground level, kind of almost primordial experience or something. So the grass, the experience of the grass isn’t like that nice Saturday that you spent with your family and now the grass for you reminds you of that nice moment that you spent. The reality of grass has more to do with the fact that it’s below your feet, that it’s down there, that it’s all these, it’s like a chaotic mix of different things that are just there on the surface of the earth rather than that. But maybe that participates in the reason why laying in the grass on that nice Saturday was a pleasant experience. Probably, it does actually, but you have to go beyond that psychological, literary type of interpretation to get to the baser reality. Yeah, just because it’s interpreted through human consciousness doesn’t mean that it’s like a personal, individual interpretation. It can be, but that’s not how symbolism works because I don’t care about some person’s individual interpretation of something when that interpretation is based on nothing but their little ideas. Symbolism becomes important when the interpretation is universal. That’s one of the criteria by which we can distinguish real symbolism from the kind of symbolism you can find in a movie or in a story that’s just been made up by someone on the street. Even then, most of the time when people tell a story or write a movie, they will use universal symbols because otherwise nobody would care. Even when it is interpreted through individuals, if they want people to care about their interpretation of reality, they’ll make it universal. Otherwise nobody cares. In a way, the idea would be to say that symbolism is really the way that our consciousness is written, in a way. What makes it possible for us to even perceive and engage the world is these basic structures that we’re made out of, that our experience is made out of. That’s symbolism. It’s really what makes it possible for us to engage with the world. The same structure as the religious hierarchy, like the religious symbolism. I hate always harping on Sam Harris, but I heard Sam Harris speaking about the phenomenon of emergence. He was talking about how we see these different patterns appear at different scales of reality and how the same patterns appear at a biological level as a city. He was really struggling to make those qualitative jumps between quarks and atoms to a person, to a city. He kept using the word higher order phenomena. He kept using this hierarchical language about these higher orders of manifestations. I thought, wow, man, you’re a religious thinker. You don’t even know it. I listened to that also. I think the answer was also interesting. What the person said is you don’t want to explain higher levels of phenomenon with the lower levels because it’s extremely complex. That’s not what Sam Harris wanted though. Sam Harris didn’t like that answer. Okay, I don’t know. The other scientists didn’t want to. Go ahead, keep going. It’s so extremely complex that giving an explanation at that order would probably be impossible. Even if it is, it would be coherent to us as humans. Right there. It’s important. You can’t get away from it. You can’t get away from the fact that we are humans. We are observing phenomenon. We can’t abstract ourselves from the equation of knowledge. The scientist, the materialist tries to step away from the universe and look at it as if he’s not in it, which is fine to a certain degree. It’s fine to understand certain things like mechanical causality. The perfect way to do that is to abstract yourself from reality. You still can’t escape the other reality, which is the ancient way of thinking, where it’s centered on the human. It’s centered on consciousness. Basically, the scientist can try to create a worldview in which he’s not there and in which his theories don’t exist in that model of the universe. It’s problematic for certain things. It’s also problematic to include it. There’s a reason why materialistic science has discovered a whole bunch of things that the traditional worldview hasn’t discovered because it’s useful to get out of the system. Ideally I think- It reaches a limit, though. At some point, it reaches its limit. I think it has reached that limit. I think quantum physics is one of the signs that this limit has been reached because they reached a point where the observer can’t get out of the equation. You have to admit as an observer that when you look at the phenomenon, you are impacting the phenomenon. There’s no way out. Now there’s no way out. They have reached that limit. It’s going to come to them soon. They’re going to have to deal with that limit. I don’t think they’re dealing with it. I think they’re going to have to deal with it, though. What does it mean? It seems like there was a whole bunch of things that happened at the mid, maybe post-war period because it wasn’t just that observation, but it was also Goodell’s theorem. Incompleteness theorem, yeah. Incompleteness theory. Same problem. Right. Then Heidegger, I think Heidegger was part of that. Heidegger presenting this idea that the way that being presents itself to us, like I was saying at the beginning, the way that we encounter the world as consciousness is not the same as the technical, let’s say, kind of scientific way of viewing the world. You can’t discount the other completely. You just can’t because then you don’t know how to act in the world. It seems like maybe it’s taking a while for people to kind of come to the finale of what that’s going to give. Hopefully this is it. This is happening right now that people are going to start. I think that one of the things that Jordan Peterson seems to be doing is tapping into that uneasiness that people have about seeing the limits of science, but then coming at it from a scientific point of view and trying to help people see it without completely … Without becoming insane. Yeah. No, seriously, because if you delve too much into this kind of universe of self-referential contradiction, you can go insane. You can lose everything. So the idea is not to … I mean, my interest in traditional cosmology doesn’t come at the cost of scientific knowledge, in my opinion. Not at all. They’re not opposed. They are, but they shouldn’t be. They should team up if possible. But one of the things the people who are materialists have to understand if that is going to eventually happen is that traditional cosmology should not be interpreted in terms of materialism. Because when you do that, it’s ridiculous. So they’re right in a way. When they laugh at religion, when they laugh at the religious worldview and the traditional worldview, they find it ridiculous, they’re right. Because the reason is they’re trying to look at it with their own lens, their own materialism. They’re trying to look at something that’s fundamentally not materialistic. So yeah, it doesn’t work. It’s ridiculous.