https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5X_px2ZJJH8
we don’t experience love as a bunch of chemicals in our brain. If you do, yeah, like if you’re in trouble, we experience love in the realm of language and consciousness and relationship. And if you try to reduce that to the chemicals in your brain, you’re not doing justice to the experience of that. And I think that that would bring us back to the discussion about Sam Harris that we had before, where there’s a podcast where he talked with, I forget who it was, he had a podcast about this notion of how reality stacks, like how, you know, emergent, they call it emergent phenomena, right? How, how things clump together into identities, right? At higher levels, because it’s not just a quantum field, like we don’t just experience it. But in the end it is just a quantum field, right? It is just in terms of material substrate, it’s just a quantum field. And so, but then how do these different levels of reality stack onto each other? And Sam kept wanting to, he kept saying, I want to explain it with the lowest common possible thing, but that doesn’t make sense because, you know, like millions and billions, like there’s millions of atoms in your hand and there’s no point in explaining it with those millions of atoms instead of explaining it with the dear, like I’m thirsty, I’m going to drink a glass of water, explaining it through the realm of consciousness. And I think that that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s the thing is that, just because you find the material causes of something, doesn’t mean that you’ve eliminated the higher realities. I think, I think it’s, to me, it’s so obvious, but I guess a lot of people aren’t able to see it, but to me, it’s so obvious, like I can both say that the music that I like comes from my, my iPod, you know, but also comes from, I don’t know, like Kanye West or whatever, like, and I can also say that Kanye West is manifesting, you know, certain immutable patterns of, of relationships that make it so that I can like that music. And so it’s like, I don’t have to eliminate, I don’t have to say, well, I’ve, I’ve discovered the secret of music. It’s coming from my earphones. I’ve got, I’ve got it. You dumb people who think that music… It’s just moving particles. Exactly. It’s like, so all you dumb people who think that music has meaning, it’s like, it’s all moving particles. Yeah. I could just imagine a music review, page that was just like every single, every single album was, it’s just moving particles. That’s right. A slightly different way to the other ones. Exactly. And it’s, and, and certain chemicals in your brain have been, we were able to see which section in your brain is, is, is, is, is, is active. It’s emulated by Kanye West. Yeah, exactly. Oh my goodness. Yeah. The problem is that that’s what you find. I mean, that’s what you find in, at least in a lot of the music reviews, that’s what you find in, at least in a lot of the people that I’ve encountered that are so against religion, you know, they say things like God doesn’t exist. And I think, well, you know what? If you think that exist means that you can hold it in your hand, you can touch it and feel it, then yes, God doesn’t exist. Fine. I’m totally fine with that. Like if you think that, if you, even if you think that it means that you can contain it, even conceptually, then yeah, God doesn’t exist. Right. Because God, the whole idea of God in the Christian tradition and in all the monotheistic traditions is that God is uncontainable, that God is beyond all concept, all name, all representation. And that not that the representations are arbitrary, that they help you to kind of get closer to the mystery, but that, but that God is not a thing. Right. And so it’s really hard to argue with an atheist who wants you to prove that God exists, like he wants you, like he wants you to prove that, you know, that, that, that tree has fallen in the forest. Like you can’t, it’s not the same kind of proof. Even existentialism starts from that perspective of realizing the language we are using cannot encapsulate the thing we’re trying to explain. Yeah. Because everything by definition, language is going to be a subset of it. Any representation of everything is going to be a subset of everything. Yeah. Therefore it cannot, it cannot be articulated. Yeah. But I think that the proper way to see it, at least, at least like in it, from the Orthodox perspective, we have this idea, we have these two visions of theology. One is called apophatic theology and cataphatic theology. And apophatic theology means this denial, right? This saying that, that, that God is beyond all name, all definition, right? That you cannot encompass the divine in, in language and images and whatever. But then the other aspect is that because of that, everything actually does manifest the divine, right? So one of the problems people have, one of the problems we’ve seen in postmodernism, especially, is that they’ll have this apophatic move where they’ll say something like, you can’t represent reality. Reality is beyond our capacity to represent it. And then they make this weird mover. They say, therefore it’s all arbitrary, right? All our structures are arbitrary. Our social structures are constructed. They’re all arbitrary, but that’s not the right move. The right move is then to see that actually all of reality then flows out of that mystery and actually points in a very fragmented way, but points towards that unsaid mystery. And so that’s what lays out the hierarchy, right? That’s what lays out the hierarchy of being is both those moves where you say it’s something beyond, but then everything is manifesting that beyond. And it’s kind of, it’s kind of flowing out of it. And that, that, that’s what helps the, it helps avoid, it helps avoid the absurd aspect of existentialism in my opinion, at least.