https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JiVc7wjFjwI
part of the task, well, sorry, I don’t want to be presumptuous. Part of what I see my task of being is to try and take the very best of science and answer all of those challenges in a way that restores confidence in the hierarchies of intelligibility and the phenomenology of connectedness. That’s one thing I’d want to say. The second thing- Now, why are you doing that? Why are you called to do that, John? Well, I’m called to do that because, well, this is how I put it to my students who take my introduction to cognitive science. We have a scientific worldview in which science and the scientists and their meaning-making have no proper ontological place. We are the whole. Science and we are the black hole within this worldview that dominates us. Let’s be very clear, and this is Heidegger’s point. Domination is not just ideational or even ideological. It is woven into the fabric of our technology, the ways we communicate. It’s woven into our cognitive grammar. We talk about even the way that we divide subjective and objective. One of Gibson’s points, right, Jordan, you mentioned Gibson, is the notion of an affordance. And an affordance is not properly objective or subjective. The graspability of this cup is not a feature of the cup. It’s not a subjective feature of me. It’s a real relation between me. And so, I mean, Gibson, again, Gibson’s work is really profound. It’s like it’s taken up into 40 cognitive science. He’s trying to challenge this grammar. And there’s a whole bunch of us. I don’t want to- I’m in no way a singular individual, although I might be a bizarre one. But I mean, I represent a lot of people who are feeling called to the fact that this lack of ontological placement and the fact how- the way it ramifies through our ontological technological structure and our cultural cognitive grammar, the very ways we think, is causing massive suffering. Absolutely right. I’m clear about that a bit. I’m still unclear about exactly what you mean. What is this black hole? I mean, is this the insistence on the absolute distinction between the subjective and the objective? No, no. Like, what is this black- okay, so what is- Well, what I meant- I mean, it’s related to that. But what I was directly referring to at the black hole is that science, does science exist? Okay, if it is, what kind of entity is it? And tell me, using physics or chemistry or even biology, use just that ontology and those methodology. Tell me what science is and tell me how it has the status to make the claims it does. And tell me how science is related to meaning and truth. And how do meaning and truth fit into the scientific worldview? They’re presupposed by that worldview, but they have no proper place within it. That’s what I mean. So whenever we’re doing the science and saying, this is what the world is, we are absenting ourselves from it. We have no home in which we are properly situated. And I think that ramifies through everything we think, say, and do to each other and with each other in a profoundly corrosive way. That’s what I mean by the meaning. Okay, what’s the profoundly corrosive way? It’s caused enormous suffering. How does that ramify? It causes enormous suffering. I mean, I was talking to somebody just the other day in Australia and there are more deaths by suicide in Australia right now than COVID. And Australia is one of the epitomes of the best countries in the world, affluent, liberal democracy, not much conflict, been at peace for a long time, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the things that the Enlightenment said would bring in unending happiness. And what you have is spiking in suicide. You have the loneliness epidemic, you have the addiction epidemic, you have people choosing to live in a virtual world rather than the real world. You have all of these things that are pointing to the fact that there’s a significant stressor. You have positive responses, too. You have the mindfulness revolution. You have the resuscitation of ancient wisdom philosophies like stoicism. You have the work of people right here. I mean, one of the things, I hope Jonathan takes this as a compliment because he knows how highly I think of him. I think one of the things that Jonathan is doing with his work is responding to this suffering and the meaning crisis. We were drawn to each other because we both saw the zombie as a mythological represent. The culture was saying to itself, we’re suffering a meaning crisis. I’m talking too much. I’m going to stop. But Jordan, if we go back to the image that you use, which is the idea that we project meaning on an objective world, already you can see the alienation that is bound up in that very proposition, which is, OK, so where are we then? We’re not in the world. We’re like these kind of ghosts that are floating above reality. And where does that come from? Where does that floating intelligence come from that’s able to separate itself so completely from the world that it’s able to just analyze it objectively and then project and then realize that it’s projecting subjective meaning on top of it. And so once I think that some of the work that Jon’s been doing and some of the work that you’ve been doing is to realize this embodied reality is that we are in the world and we are part and parcel of the manner in which meaning even the world itself discloses itself. We people who think they can imagine the world outside of human consciousness, like where are they? Where are these signs? Where are they standing that they can tell us that we are projecting meaning onto the world? Are they like gods up in the world? They would never say that. They’ve taken themselves out of the equation. And so coming back into reality and understanding this image of communion, for example, like a lot of the images that Jon is saying is really this image of communion is that meaning is relational, that it’s communal, that it’s all these things that can help us even understand once again what the religious patterns are for is to just hold. It’s actually holding reality together. And once we’ve once we’ve broken that, then we get this increasing alienation. We get the increasing fragmentation, you know, the suburbs as just the spread of people that don’t know each other. They don’t have common projects that have nothing in common except that they’re living in in just this equal space. And so this kind of reducing of hierarchy in the world that they that the scientists wanted to happen, it’s happened now to us and everything’s breaking apart and nobody can hear each other. And it’s a it’s a direct consequence of that thinking. Yeah, there’s a lot that’s just stimulating my thinking here. And one is I mean, I love the sciences, but I hate scientism and scientism is all over the place in our culture. I deal with it all the time in my evangelical work, hearing from not just younger people, from everybody in our culture, that science is the criterion. You know, I saw a video, Jonathan, you and Jordan were talking to Brett Weinstein and it was about, I don’t know, maybe something along these lines. But he made very articulately, intelligently, but made the argument that the sciences, the physical sciences belong in the supreme position vis a vis all forms of human knowing. And I’m shouting at the screen, no, no, that’s exactly where they don’t belong. And that’s a form of scientism. The medieval is called theology, like the queen of the sciences. Well, at least that’s more appropriate. You’re talking about God and the summa bonum having some kind of supremacy. I also go right back to the classical world. The sciences, from a platonic standpoint, they’re terrific. But you’re just getting ever more precise accounts of the cave, of the images, the fleeting, even as an images of the world to rise to higher forms of consciousness by way of mathematics, first of all, then then to the higher forms of philosophy, metaphysics, Aristotle, you know, moving from physics to mathematics to metaphysics. It’s not to denigrate for a second the sciences. Aristotle is the founder of many ways of physics. But it is to say there’s a hierarchy again, there’s an epistemic hierarchy and science, physical science does not belong at the top of it. When it does, something goes really wrong with the human spirit. And there’s a there’s a starvation of the spirit. Well, and it’s hard to know. How to take that seriously, like, let’s say that’s a fact, there’s a starvation of the human spirit, that’s a fact. Well, is it a fact like a fact that emerges from physics? Well, not exactly. It’s a different kind of fact. But what happens if we ignore it? Well, people suffer and die. And we don’t use the fact that in the absence of a proposition, people suffer and die as an index of its truth, not not from the scientific perspective, that that isn’t the methodology of science. But that leaves us with this problem of of meaning. It sort of delivered to us. And it isn’t something it isn’t obvious to me that science can address it at all. I mean, Sam Harris and other thinkers like Harris have tried to put the value to to to bring the domain of value within the domain of science. I think it’s it’s an effort that’s doomed to failure because I don’t think they’re of the same type. I think that science by its very nature excludes. It does everything it can to exclude value, except John. It leaves us with the problem you described, which is the problem that Jung addressed when he was tying the development of empirical science back to alchemy, because and this goes back to the idea of the hierarchies that we started out with. You know, you believe that. He was really curious about why people ever became motivated to take things apart like scientists did to concentrate on the minute like that. What dream drove them, what fantasies drove them? And for Jung, it was he found that fantasy in the thousands of years of work on alchemy and the alchemical notion was there exists a substance which eventually became a material substance whose discovery would grant upon its bearer immortality, perfect health and endless wealth. So the idea, the dream was that substance could be found in the material world. And that was a deep, deep unconscious fantasy manifested in all sorts of images, all sorts of bizarre images that Jung had the genius to be able to analyze and understand. He saw that as the dream that preceded the development of science in in in Western culture. Thousands took thousands and thousands of years to unfold this dream. And scientists were encapsulated within that dream, whether they knew it or not. And so the prime example would be Newton, who wrote much more on alchemy than he did on physics. And so and so John, as scientists, at least from the Jungian perspective, let’s say, were necessarily motivated by a narrative that we don’t understand scientifically to engage in the scientific process per se. And we’re so deeply possessed by that, that it it guides and moves our perceptions without us as scientists even necessarily having to be aware that we’re participating in that narrative. So to your point, the whole enterprise is driven by a dream whose reality can’t be. Encapsulated within the process itself, it’s a very strange thing.