https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=l81rKyPRnko
What is the relationship between consciousness and reality? So, I think I also need to say very importantly that the word consciousness is a modern word. I don’t know what its origin is, but it’s definitely not a word that’s used by the Church Fathers. It’s not a word that is used in the Christian tradition so much. But it’s okay. It’s an okay word. It’s fine. The best way to understand it, in my opinion, has to do with attention. It has to do with what John Dravegi calls relevance realization. The problem is again the problem of multiplicity. It’s like how do we background and foreground things? How do we know that they’re relevant enough to see, not just in terms of your eyes, but to perceive? And then we attend. So attention is, you could say, the world is made of attention. It may be a good way to understand that. That attention is one of the elements that coagulates multiplicities into identities. Maybe that’s the best way to understand it. The world could be cut up. You can understand on a purely quantified level. The world could be cut up in an indefinite amount of ways, but it’s not. It’s cut up in certain ways, and those have to do with what we attend to. It has to do with what we care about. It has to do with what we are capable of being conscious of, you could say. And so then the attention and the relevance, realizing what is relevant so that I can formulate categories, both propositionally, but also just in terms of grabbing things and engaging with things and knowing that it’s like, oh, I’m grabbing that? That’s a hammer. Like I’m going to use it to do this. I’m walking on something which is solid, and then I see there’s water and I don’t walk on that. And so it’s like, that’s what I mean. It’s like it’s not just an abstract mental thing. It’s an actual realizing of what is relevant and what is meaningful and in what way as I engage with the world. And so that is where symbolism comes from. So the symbolism of water has very little to do with its physical characteristics in terms of what molecules constitute it. But it has everything to do with the fact that you drink water, you can drown in water, you bathe in water. Water comes from above and then there’s salt water below. It’s like this is what constitutes the symbolism of water. And if you ignore that and you think that water is just a bunch of molecules, you will die. The symbol is that you will die. You will die because you’re not drinking it. You will die because you drown in it. Like whatever it is, you’re going to die if you don’t live in the symbolic world. So, yeah, so that’s the relationship, I think. No, great answer. Great answer. That the water analogy is great because it’s also like you can’t see things as just a bunch of I want to use the word things again. But I don’t walk into it like a bunch of components that constitute something. Yeah, yeah, you just cannot. The world doesn’t work that way. Yeah, and we don’t experience it that way at all. And the way we experience it, I would say also the way… Okay, well, maybe this is maybe another question I could ask you. So when somebody looks at a situation and they frame it differently, so I don’t know where I heard it, but I’m so careful these days to say there was a study that said this or there was a study that said that. But just bear with me. Apparently, there was a study where they went to Olympic athletes who had won bronze, silver and gold medals, and they tried to figure out which one had the most regret. And you would maybe think the bronze medalist because they came in third place, but they’ve actually found it was the silver medalist because the silver medalist, the way they frame the situation is that they were so close to the goal. They were so close to being number one, but they didn’t reach it. The gold medalist is obviously just happy that they won. And bronze medalist, he’s just happy that he had a place on the podium, right? He’s just happy that he got to be up there at all. And so I’m curious, especially with the recent rise of stoicism, and I know John Vervecki talks about this a lot in his… He talks about the meaning crisis and stoicism is kind of one of these re-emergences as a consequence of… I hope I’m not misrepresenting what he said, but just off the top of my head, stoicism is kind of emerging and this idea of the way I perceive things can actually change the way I feel about things, which actually as a consequence changes the way I experience reality. And I think that’s true. I think if you view water as a set of components making up something, and then you view it as you’ve said in the symbolic sense, that’s obviously going to change the way you perceive things and as a consequence going to change the way you feel about the world and the way you experience reality. So our framing, our conceptual system and reality, I don’t think you can find a clear line between the two. Is that a fair thing to say? No, I think you’re right. I think you can’t, especially if you understand what I propose at the outset, which is the inevitability of attention and relevance in the problem of how things exist. And so we’re not talking about the material causes of things when we’re talking about that. It’s like we’re not also denying them. We’re not saying that it’s all the magical worlds of imagination. The world has, let’s say the world as we experience it has certain constituents and it doesn’t deny any of the scientific realities that people discover. But it’s contained within the symbolic world. It’s necessarily because humans care for a definite amount of things and in a hierarchy. And so it’s like humans, how can I say this? A good way to explain it would be humans can care about NASA taking pictures of deep space. They can care about that, but they better care about that less than they care about eating and sleeping because you’ll die again. There’s a hierarchy of care and that hierarchy of care manifests itself constantly. And so the same would be like even in terms of scientific research. So you can research things like that, for example, like what stars are made of. And humans can care about that. But if you do that and then you stop doing research that is about what humans care about in the most immediate way, then you’re going to break everything. Things are going to break and people are going to revolt. And so it’s like there’s just a normal hierarchy of care that people ignore. It’s just about getting back into your body and realizing the world you really live in. And realizing that I can believe that the earth revolves around the sun, but it’s more important that the sun comes up in the morning because that organizes my day and it organizes all of society and people are, you know, most people are awake during the day and most people sleep at night. And that’s basically the pattern of everybody you know and everything that functions in the world. And so if you mock or if you say something like it’s an illusion, right, the sun coming up in the morning is an illusion, what’s really true is that the earth is turning on itself or that the earth rotates around the sun or whatever. Like, you know, the procession of the sun and the sky in terms of seasons, it’s an illusion. All of this type of thinking. This is where people fall into nihilism and where they don’t realize the world they live in. They just don’t realize that you can say that as much as you want, but you can’t stop the fact that the sun, you know, coming up in the morning and going down at night manages your world, everything about it.