https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=jiui_NK6hVk
So there’s a sense in which you see this in the mystical fathers. You see this in St. Ephraim and several of the Church Fathers, where they talk about how the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, the reason why it made us fall was because we were not ready for it. And that it is ultimately a blessing, but it’s a blessing that had to be prepared, you could say. And so either Adam and Eve would have sometimes, Adam and Eve are represented as children. You see that in St. Irenaeus, for example, and that this fall is necessary for their, it’s like an educational process in which they will then come back up on the other side as having integrated both the consciousness of good and evil and the garden. And the image of that, of course, is something like the heavenly Jerusalem. We see that at the end of the Bible. And so there’s a sense in which, at least in this type of vision, that conscious, the meta-consciousness is what brings about the fall, but is ultimately what actually makes us similar to God. And because I’ve heard you talk about God more as this kind of unconscious or basic consciousness that doesn’t have metacognition. So I was wondering what your thought is on that, which is that at least in the Christian understanding, and I think in many other religious understandings, the idea that God is unconscious or is just this very, very basic form of consciousness that doesn’t have metaconsciousness seems to imply that metaconsciousness is degrading from that, or that it’s a fall again, that it’s only a fall, or that it’s a less, it’s less than where it comes from. Well, there’s a lot. Sorry. Back there, Jonathan. Go back to my true story and how I played chess extremely well while lacking metaconsciousness because I was under the effect of drugs. If you regard it from that perspective, metaconsciousness was limiting because a limited but deliberate form of intelligence, metaconscious intelligence, obfuscated a spontaneous, much broader but less reliable form of intelligence. In other words, the spontaneous intelligence of nature. But the guy who won those games was the spontaneous intelligence of nature. Unobfuscated by my explicit deliberate reasoning. From that perspective, it is a step backwards because it contracts intelligence. But whatever stays within the field of metacognition, which is a contracted field, vastly contracted field, it’s like looking down a microscope. You only see a tiny part of the world, but that tiny part now is visible. So you are, as far as that tiny part is concerned, it’s better. You see it more clearly. It’s like looking down the microscope. You see one square millimeters, but you see it more clearly. It is better, but it’s worse in the sense that you don’t see anything around it anymore. And to me, that’s metaconsciousness. And that’s why metaconsciousness was favored by evolution because as far as survival is concerned, you only need to look at the tiny subset of existence that is in your intelligence. The tiny subset of existence that is in your immediate surroundings, because that’s what has a direct immediate bearing on your survival and your ability to reproduce. So metaconsciousness is like a microscope. It blinds you to nearly everything, but it makes you see much more clearly whatever remains within its field. It obfuscates everything else, but it amplifies what it focuses on. So it’s both a step forward and a step backward. Now in the Bible, it’s written that the serpent tells Eve that after she takes a bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she will be like God. Now you may interpret that as God being metaconscious, but interpret it differently. And I’ll show you with you my own interpretation. The key characteristic of the deity is the ability to create realities. That’s ultimately the single most defining feature of the divine mind is the ability to create realities. A non-metacognitive mind cannot create realities because it’s always in the present. That’s the Eastern Advaita and Buddhist approaches. You’re always in the present. In other words, you’re always in the world created for you by the divinity. But when you metacognize and you identify yourself as a subject of your experiences, as opposed to the experiences themselves, metacognition is what allows you to say, I have hunger as opposed to I am the hunger. If you’re always in the present, you are the hunger buddy. You don’t have hunger. You are the hunger. You are the world created for you. But when you become metacognitive, you invent futures and you manipulate pasts. You create worlds. You create realities. And I think it is in that sense that Eve would become like God having taken a bite from the fruit of metacognition. And that is a fall in the same way that looking down a microscope is a fall. It’s a contraction. It obfuscates everything else. You become blind to everything. But it is a step forward in the sense that it allows you to see that tiny subset more clearly. So have you ever thought about creation that way, which is that if you read a creation account in Genesis, you have at the outset, you have, you know, the heaven and earth, the earth is chaos and void, emptiness and void. And then God creates names at the outset. And if you see the way it works is that God says, let there be light. And then God sees and God says it is good. It is good. Right. And so there is that narrowing. It seems like that narrowing is actually part of the separation of phenomena itself, because the completely unbridled potential or just like, you know, anything that has no identity yet that is completely just potential is not in. You can’t inhabit that. Like even when you took your psychedelics, you didn’t. If you had, I mean, imagine that some people say they do reach that point of complete, you know, but then you wouldn’t stay like that for, you wouldn’t stay there for very long, right? Because you would probably just die of hunger at some point or you would, you wouldn’t. But there has to be this focus where there’s a contraction and pointing. And then a recognizing of the good. So that’s why I really like the idea that you’re saying that there’s a sense in which medic consciousness is part of the creation of worlds. I see that in the Genesis creation narrative itself. I will agree with you. I’m not going to interpret evidence differently just to fit my narrative. So I will agree with you that that part of Genesis where God passes value judgments on his creation is an indication, a indication of matter cognition because value judgments can only be passed through matter cognition. That’s why animals are amoral. They are not metacognizant. So they can’t pass value judgments. They carry no moral responsibility. We do. And the Bible does suggest that the creator divinity was metaconscious in so far as it could pass value judgment. So I’ll give you two answers. Based on a purely analytic approach, the natural sciences and empirical evidence, rational thinking, I would say we have every reason to believe that the broader mind of nature, mind at large, is not metaconscious. Why? Because metaconsciousness seems to have been something that evolved at great cost through eons of evolution by natural selection. It seems to be an ability that forms in response to a challenging environment, an environment that requires appropriate and timely responses to environmental challenges. And therefore, that narrowing of metacognition that allows for a more efficient localized, narrow, but much more efficient and clear response was favored by natural selection. So if metaconsciousness is something that evolved, then it was not there in the beginning. And the divine mind or the mind of nature, that especially unbound field of subjectivity, that underlies all nature, did not have to put up with the challenges of a local ecosystem. So it wouldn’t have metaconsciousness. Another reason is we don’t seem to see metaconsciousness in the simpler forms of life on this planet. The evolutionarily speaking earlier forms of life, there is a clear correlation between more evolved species and increasing metaconsciousness. Bacchyderms, cetaceans, and higher primates are highly evolved species. If you look at paramecium or paramecia, which are single-celled organisms that go after food and run away from danger, even though they don’t have a nervous system, they react instinctively. Crocodiles are very instinctual creatures. You can tell precisely how many inches you have to be close to a crocodile before it tries to lounge on you. It’s not a deliberating metaconsciousness. So from an analytic and empirical perspective, I would say we have every reason to think that metaconsciousness is evolved and it’s not there from the beginning. It’s not in the mind of nature. It’s not in the mind of God, which doesn’t mean that nature isn’t intelligent, because spontaneous intelligence isn’t metacognitive. And spontaneous intelligence, although it doesn’t amplify things, it has a very broad view. It’s the telescope as opposed to the microscope. It doesn’t discern the microscopic details, but it sees a lot more. Now, if I ignore analytic philosophy and natural sciences, and we speak purely from religious scripture and religious insight, then I would have to acknowledge that there are plenty of suggestions throughout the religious traditions of this world that the creator divinity, even if it’s not the ultimate divinity like inostasis, the creator divinity was metaconscious. That seems to be suggested throughout. Do I think that is a possibility? Well, certainly it is a possibility, but in my mind, it’s a possibility that would require the following. It would require this reality to be a deliberately created reality and not a spontaneous, naturalistic unfolding of what is not a product of nature, but an artificial creation with rules set in a premeditated way for a deliberate purpose. In other words, a kind of theater that was set up for a purpose by a metaconscious intelligence. That’s what it would require. Do I see external empirical evidence for it? No, none. Do I see conceptual reasons to entertain this possibility? No, none. Do I have intuitions every now and then that resonate with this possibility? Yes, I do.