https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JLJd1-tRpiY
Hey everybody, it’s your friend Adam. I’m here with Jonathan Pujo. We’ve been talking about having a conversation for a while and my fans are dying for me to talk to you just so you know. That’s hilarious. Everybody… Well, I’ve been seeing you for years, like just especially, I mean, since the Jordan Peterson thing happened, I’ve been seeing your videos, watching a few videos and just kind of seeing you around with Paul Van de Klay and different people. So I’m happy to talk to you finally. Yeah, I’m a pro-Christianity atheist. So I’m hated on both sides often. So I’m much less hated by the Christians because obviously I’m a pro-Christianity. I grew up Christian. So I feel qualified to talk about Christianity because I grew up within the religion. I grew up Southern Baptist and though I kind of grew into atheism because of my being a fan of science and evolution and all that kind of stuff, I’ve sort of become an atheist. I still understand the value of Christianity and an ethical system and an ethical package. And really the people that despise me are what I call the antitheists, which I like to separate the atheist from the antitheists because atheists just lack a belief in God. A lot of times antitheists will say, well, an atheist… Sometimes it’s just a lack of belief in God and I’ll think, yes, that’s true. But you have a belief in something different. You’re an antitheist. You believe the world would be a better place without religion. Like, that’s the central motivating feature of your ideology. I do not believe the world would be a better place without religion. I lack a belief in God. I’m an atheist. You’re an antitheist. So I make that separation, that distinction. But we were talking a little bit before we started about… You recently did a talk with Rationality Rules. And I listened to that talk. I thought it was interesting. But I agree with some of the people saying that there was a little bit of talking past one another. So I thought, it made me want to have a conversation with you even more because I thought we’re probably less likely to talk past one another. Ironically, Rationality Rules made this video completely savaging me. I made some response videos to him and I thought he and I would have a constructive dialogue. That never happened. Like, I’m closer to his position. Like he did a video recently. It’s funny because, okay, so let me give the backstory here. Yeah, I didn’t know about this story. I didn’t know this had happened. So Rationality Rules was making Jordan Peterson videos and just straw manning the hell out of Jordan Peterson. It was driving me crazy. It was driving my fans crazy. So they wanted me to do response videos because I understand Jordan Peterson’s argument. Jordan Peterson’s argument is surprisingly close to Brett Weinstein’s argument about metaphorical truth. So I’m doing these videos explaining how Rationality Rules is completely straw manning the argument here. Later on, Rationality Rules does a video where he’s all in favor of metaphorical truth. And I’m like, why are you crapping all over Jordan Peterson? If you’re in favor of what Jordan Peterson is talking about, you’re not necessarily understanding it. So I made some response videos to him. He made a response video to me basically just dismissing me as some internet troll. And I’m like, I’ve been on YouTube longer than you, man. I know everyone on YouTube. I don’t necessarily understand where you’re coming from. So I thought I would have some kind of a constructive dialogue with him about this stuff. But it’s funny to me that now he’s kind of making videos that are my position. So that’s actually a good thing. Like in the long run, if he’s going to come around to my position anyway, regardless of whether or not we get along, I’m comfortable with that. But you evidently have a problem with his position. And I saw him. I had been, I’ve seen his videos like just anyway. I’ve seen a lot of the different types of atheists and different types of people who have different ideologies on YouTube for years. I’ve been now on YouTube for about four years. And I’d seen his videos and his kind of his anti Jordan Peterson videos. I had written one comment on one of his videos saying that I think that he misunderstands the argument. And we had a little bit of an exchange on one of the videos. But then I thought, I don’t think we could understand each other. And then recently I did see his video on Bret Weinstein’s metaphorical truth. And I was really surprised at some of the things he was saying. And I thought, oh, actually, so if he can find some ground in Bret Weinstein’s argument, then maybe there could be a point of contact where we could talk, at least kind of try to understand each other. Because until then, I felt like we’d probably completely talk past each other. And he has been really super gracious. He was extremely generous. We had a private conversation first to kind of to just say, OK, look, this is what I’m going to say. We weren’t trying the idea is like we don’t want to trap each other. Like, that’s not the point. You really want to try to explore the ideas. And it’s been it’s been really positive for me, at least the conversation has been positive. I do feel like you said that in the conversation. A few things happened. I think one thing one thing that happened was we did end up talking past each other on certain points. And I feel like he didn’t he didn’t he hadn’t realized the extent to which I’m actually a Christian. And then I think that that surprised him. And so then he was kind of taken off guard because, you know, at some point he says something like, wait, so you really believe in God? And I was like, well, yeah, you know, and then and I think that that surprised a little bit because I think he saw me more on Jordan Peterson’s side, let’s say. But but but yeah, in the end, in the end, I do feel if you watch the comments sections on both our channels, it’s clear that we are still talking way past each other because it’s very radicalized. Like the the comment sections, like on my side, they’re saying he didn’t understand what I was saying. And on his side, they’re saying I’m just trying to speak around. You know, I’m just I’m just just basically saying things to justify my Christian position and not not really, you know, engaging with the argument. So so it’s too bad. Well, I don’t know. Like for me, it was like a test. It was like I’m going to find the person that I feel is kind of the furthest from my position that I could actually talk to and then and then try to see if we can understand each other. So I’m not sure. I’m not sure it happened, but I’m not totally giving up yet, let’s say. Well, personal feelings aside, I think he’s cultivated an audience of antitheist. I harp on this distinction all the time because it’s so important. He has an audience that wants to believe the world would be a better place without religion. Even the LGBT stuff came in in your talk with him. Like a lot of those people who are antitheist or LGBT activists, they feel religion is dangerous to the LGBT movement. And maybe they have an argument there. Like, I don’t necessarily disagree with them. In America, we have this thing. And I’m sure it’s the same. You’re in Canadian, right? In Canada, I’m sure it’s pretty much the same thing. Like if if you’re LGBT and the and the church has prohibitions on LGBT, then you can leave the church like nobody’s forcing you to stay there. This isn’t Islam or anything like that. Like go enjoy your life without the church. So as long as it’s not being forced upon you, I feel like they have less of an argument there. So but but one of the things that I thought we could talk about that would be more interesting is that I feel like I could get past some of the talking past one another that you had with him. Because I think about Steve or rationality rules, whatever he’s calling himself these days. You if that I’m not sure that he can win that audience over, but he has more of a chance of winning that audience over than either of either you or I have. And I know that when he was making response videos to Jordan Peterson, they very much saw Jordan Peterson as just like this Bible thumper that was winning people over to Christianity. But the reason Jordan Peterson was winning people over to Christianity, I think, is because he was putting a rationalist scientific spin on Christianity that made it make sense for a lot of people who were scientifically minded atheist types. So it was just a misunderstanding that rationality rules had about Jordan Peterson that a lot of my response videos were trying to explain. And I it’s funny that you are probably closer to the type of person that he thought Jordan Peterson was than I think. I’m more like I’m an actual I go to church. I don’t go to church now because of covid. But like in a normal world, I go to church. Yes. I you know, and I pray and I have I have taken on all the traditional practices of a Christian. Like that’s for sure. Do you think Jordan because we have, you know, this running back going with Jordan Peterson is like, is Jordan Peterson really just an like an atheist that, you know, understands Christianity, but he just doesn’t want to say he’s an atheist because he loses all his street cred. I believe Jordan Peterson is probably closer to the atheist position. I think that he’s the thing. This is the thing about Jordan is that Jordan is what you see. There is there are no two Jordan Petersons, and that’s something. You know, that is important for people to understand is that it whatever you see of him, none of it is like a show. If you see him hesitating on a question is because he’s hesitating on a question. He’s not doing it. He’s not doing it as a as a as a way to to to play a game like I had a conversation. I mean, I haven’t talked to him a lot recently because he’s sick and everything. But I had a conversation with him. Maybe about a year and a half ago where he started talking about Genesis again, and he he was just he was just like wrestling with the thing, like wrestling with the story. And and then he says, what if these stories really were true? Like, what if they were true? And he was excited about it on the phone. And I was like, are you like really like I was like, come on, man. Like I thought I thought like from my side, I thought we were past this, you know. But I think he’s really kind of he’s really wrestling with these questions existentially. And so that’s what it is. So I so I think that he’s not an atheist, but I think that he doesn’t he doesn’t have faith that say it that way. That is, there’s a difference between saying there’s a difference between saying that you believe that God refers to something which has value, let’s say something like that, or and faith, which is a celebration of that which is above you and a participation in that story. So those two things are different. So do you want to get into your conception of God? First of all, just since we’re talking about the the the rationality rules talk, is there anything that you’d like to say that you felt wasn’t said there or after you’ve had some time to reflect on it? What what are some of your afterthoughts? Well, for sure, I really I do feel like I wasn’t like I wasn’t able to communicate what I wanted. And so and it’s been helpful to be honest, like it’s been helpful to watch Paul Van der Kley did a comment on the talk and I’ve been reading his comment section in my comment section. And so it’s been I think it’s going to help me in the end because. You know, these things are hard to talk about. And so I feel like I wasn’t able to communicate one basic thing, which is that I could maybe summarize it this way, which is that I have a cosmological frame and this cosmological frame is actually universal. It actually isn’t limited to Christianity. Christianity has some key puzzle elements to that cosmological frame, which I think are extremely important, I would say, make Christianity, you know, truer than anything else. But the frame itself is the same in Taoism and in Hinduism and in and in all the religious like it’s a basic cosmological frame and that and the the applications of that pattern are what cause all the rules in terms of morality that I believe in. And so. If you’re going to argue against some moral position in the Christian in the Christian worldview. Then you have to be able to tell me what it is, first of all, from which position are you arguing that? Because I know, like I have I have a whole pattern that tells me how a pattern that is as useful to my moral positions than they are to how I build houses and how you build cities and how you organize government. All of these things come down from this cosmological pattern. There’s variety. It’s not a totalitarian thing. There’s variety. So if you’re going to tell me that this moral position of Christianity is wrong, then you have to be able to argue your frame to me, not just this position. And you also have to be able to tell me what is the good you’re aiming towards, because I know what the good I’m aiming towards is, whether I succeed or not. We can argue about the application and say this application doesn’t lead to that goal. But if you’re going to tell me that it’s not good enough and you need something better, you have to tell me what the better is. And I feel like that’s the that’s the place where we were stuck, where I was saying. If you if you tell me it’s this this aspect of Christianity is inadequate, then you have to be able to tell me towards what I need to modify to, if I’m going to modify it towards what is it liberty? Is it equality? Is it what is the value? I don’t know. I’m not sure I could understand what that is. Is it comfort? Is it more people alive and less people dying? Is what is it like? What is the thing you’re aiming towards? What is the telos? And so I think that that’s that that was where to me, at least it stuck and we were unable to kind of get past that. But I feel like it’s maybe because I didn’t articulate enough. The idea that that I don’t care as much about the the particular laws and rules that you don’t like in Christianity, because the frame is so powerful. That I’m willing to even accept some things that I might disagree on in detail because because it’s worth to keep this frame and to live inside the story and to participate in these communities. It’s worth it to accept a few things that I might even disagree with. I should I forgot to mention, too, that we’re both artists. So I think I think I think we have that in common. But just back on the on the topic, the arguing against the morality, I think like I’ve hung out with these people enough and, you know, I’m sort of tacitly part of their tribe. I think they would say something to the effect of of, you know, truth, scientific truth, materialist truth has a higher higher survival value just because of they always want to point to medical advancements and things like that, that putting all of our eggs in the metaphorical truth basket would be more detrimental to the survival of more people than to focus on scientific truth. So I think that is really their biggest disagreement or argument against your ethical package that I think that they would pull out. So so let so this is something that has come up with Brett Weinstein as well, which is so on the one hand, you have this evolutionary thinking and this this like basic scientific thinking, which is also bound up in evolutionary thinking. And these two things are strangely bound up together. And and so. What I hear is on the one hand, I hear people saying that scientific truth is the highest, it’s the most important. And then I hear at the same time, the same people saying we need to break our evolutionary code, we need to move out of our evolutionary code because it’s dangerous, because it leads to genocide, because it leads to rape, because it leads to all of these horrible tribalistic things. And so they’re saying we need to be able to now to now transcend our evolutionary impulses. And my question is, again, towards what? Like, where are you standing? Like, if you’re if you’re not then in the evolutionary camp and you’re in another camp, then tell me what’s your camp. Well, tell me where you are and what you’re aiming towards. What do you think the evolutionary camp is? Because you’re a believer in evolution, right? I mean, you’re not. I think evolution happened. I don’t know if I believe it. OK. What would you or believe in it? How about if I did? I don’t really believe in it, but I don’t mind it. So maybe we’re just talk. I don’t want to talk past you. Yeah. So you you believe evolution by natural selection is happening today. You know, the origin of species, you believe in that. I think I definitely think that or you think it’s true, I guess. Powerful. It’s a very powerful process that has been brought to light in the last few centuries. Believe is a tough term. I think that’s a term we’re getting hung up on. You you think you accept that it’s true that evolution is happening. Evolution by natural selection. Yeah, I’ll say yes. That’s fine. What is it? I can say yes, that’s OK. Reproduction variation selection, I think, is what you can nail it down to. OK, this also happens culturally. Do you accept that? I think so. Cultural evolution happens through the same process, right? A bunch of people think, let’s let’s try something different. Let’s all switch our genders and form a commune and see what happens. Maybe this will be a successful cultural adaptation. If it’s not successful, if it doesn’t reproduce offspring, it dies out. And that cultural mutation dies. Correct. Same way as organisms themselves reproduce and die. Yeah. Well, that that that has some even in evolutionary terms that has a there’s a problem because there’s a limited amount of energy you can expound. Sure. Totally. Most evolutionary processes are actually hyper conservative. Very much so. Because you have very little energy. And if you start to you start to put all your energy in these experimental forms, then you’re going to be dead before you have the time to even know whether or not all of these forms you’re trying to experiment with were going to be fruitful. And this is the best argument against the celebrity atheists like Dawkins and Harris and those guys, because like religion is all these costly has all these costly features to it. Evolution is the best argument that religion is doing something useful evolutionarily or why would it exist at all? We’re we’re expending all these costly energies, you know, going to church, helping people, meeting other, you know, meeting together, forming coalitions, all of that stuff has to be evolutionarily advantageous somehow or other. Because as as religion leaves the public sphere, then the birth rate goes down. So sure. Exactly. That too. That too. So so you you are probably in agreement with Brett Weinstein, that evolution or that religion is some sort of of extended phenotype. I think it’s the way that he referred to it in his talk with Richard Dawkins, which it doesn’t bother. I like I obviously do not view the world primarily in evolutionary terms. Right. Like I interpret the evolutionary terms based on. I think that the frame, the cosmic frame that is given by, let’s say, traditional society is more powerful than that. But I don’t mind it, like in the sense that I that I think it’s fine. You know, I think it’s OK. But I think that when you try to apply these types of patterns to religious thinking, what happens is you catch a few things, like you catch a few things that are true and a few things connect. So you look at the rules in the scripture and you and you’re like, oh, oh, I can explain this through this, this evolutionary process. I can explain this. But then there’s like 80 percent of it that you still think is nonsense. But even if you do believe that it’s it’s like this emergent thing that happened, then it it needs for it to have been selected for it needs to have some coherence or at least some some some application. So are you talking about Christianity specifically total nonsense for thousands of years? You know, I don’t think that that that’s true. And the frame that I’m trying to to explain to people makes sense of it all. Like it doesn’t none of it falls, falls to the side. There’s nothing in scripture which falls to the side if you use the basic cosmic pattern that that that you find that you find in the religion itself. OK, the I’m not I’m not completely sure what you’re meaning on the cosmic pattern, but we’ll get back to it because I just if well, I want you the. Some one thing that came up continuously in your talk with rationality rules was like the goal, the what’s good, that kind of stuff. So I just think, you know, as as impartial observers of evolution, like we both believe believe it’s reproduction, variation, selection. What is the goal of reproduction, variation, selection in the context of physical organisms? To me, it seems like it has to be something on par with utilitarianism, like the most well-being for the largest number of people. And it’s it’s perspective oriented because it is going to be the, you know, obviously what’s good for us is not necessarily what’s good for chimpanzees. Like there’s a reason why humans have dominated this planet and chimpanzees have not. Right. But why is it the most good for the most people? I really can’t get there with evolutionary thinking, because because it can be to your advantage to to massively dominate other populations. Evolutionary, in an evolutionary way, it’s it’s way it’s your advantage to completely dominate the other lines. Yes, I agree. So that your line is it is advantaged. I agree. That’s why I specifically said that it’s perspective oriented, because obviously the utilitarian argument for lions is going to be different than the utilitarian argument for human beings, because the most good for the most people is different than the most good for the most lions. The most good for the most lions is the frame of reference for a lion, though. They’re obviously they would like to be in the humanity role right now. And lions will eat the offering of other lions if they. Yes, yes. You know, to make sure that is actually that is actually a bad thing in the utilitarian argument, because the the most thriving for the most organisms in that in that species is going to help because you’ve got to admit the numbers matters, especially in an evolutionary game. So while different different speed, different humans form different tribes that competed against other tribes, a bigger tribe always had a better advantage. Correct. Like if I have 100 people versus 10 people, obviously you put your money on the 100 people. Right. Well, not always. I don’t think that’s why I know, obviously. That’s also why that’s why you have moments in history where the small like Mongolian tribe comes in and savages the Chinese empire. Why, though? Why? What what what is the advantage that they have over the numbers? Technological advantage or flexibility? OK, so they have a better ethical system. Sorry. So they have a better ethical system, a better strategy. Like they have more. They have a better system to dominate because when you have, let’s say you have a system which is too big, then it had lack flexibility. And so when the bigger it gets, the more chance you have of a small thing coming in and piercing the bubble. Right. Right. And because it has massive flexibility, then it can wiggle itself into into a space and take over. But if you have two teams like that and one has a superior, I’m just I call it an ethical system because that’s basically what ethical systems are, the rules of engagement between a group. So if that group has a rule, has a ethical system that allows them to form a bond of 10 guys that can beat 100 guys, that ethical system, everyone’s going to look at and go, that’s a good ethical system. I think we should adopt it. And pretty soon that 10 guys is 100 guys and they can beat a thousand people. Right. Yeah. So that ethical thousand, then there’s another 10 guys with a different, with a different ethical system. Maybe the ethical system will change as societies. That’s why societies change as you, as you get rich and as you get, as you stabilize, then your world is going to start to look like what you are. It’s you can’t just, you can’t, you can’t be, you know, it’s like Jordan, it’s like you can’t be a boxer, a super aggressive boxer if, if, if at some point you stop fighting for your life. Like at some point you’re going to lose your edge. You need to find ways to keep your edge, but it’s going to happen all, it’s going to happen by itself. Like it’s just going to, it’s going to be part of your success is going to be that you’re going to lose that edge that you had the beginning. It’s just a normal cycle of things. Well, I view Christianity and, and different religions as these ethical systems that are uniting people and, and allowing people to cooperate with one another. That’s the way that I see these ethical systems. So, so what if we could say that it’s not an ethical system? I don’t think Christianity and I don’t think religions are ethical systems. I think that that’s one of the problems which makes it hard for people to understand religion because if you think that they’re really, if they’re an ethical system, then you don’t understand why you have to build an Ark of the Covenant and have two angels with their wings touching and you don’t understand why you need to, to, to have, you know, veils around holy places. All of this stuff makes no sense if it’s just an ethical system. You know, it’s, it’s actually more than an ethical system. It’s a, it’s a frame of reality. It’s a, it’s a way to understand value and to understand, not to understand, but to participate in hierarchies of being. Okay. So that, so that these hierarchies lay themselves out and create units. So it has more to do with identity than it has to do with ethics. It has more to do with who you are, what your place is in the world, and what’s your relationship with others. And then downstream from that, you have rules and regulations and, and let’s say ways of acting. But at first, it’s like we worship the thing that unites us. We celebrate the thing that unites us, just like a basketball team will celebrate their, their logo, their mascot, that the, the, the, they will find rituals to cohere and they’ll have a totem, like a mascot that will go out into the crowd and get everybody to cheer for the team. That’s the most important part. That has to do with identification and, and social cohesion through participation. Through participative identity more than the moral stuff. The moral stuff comes down downstream from that. Once you understand that, then a lot of religious stuff is going to make way more sense to you. You know, you’re going to understand what people gather together, why they sing together, why they pray together, why they look in the same direction, why they eat a meal together. All of these things are manifestations of participant participation in the same identity under a God, under a something which unites them, an identity which unites them together. Well, I, I, from an evolutionary frame, all of this makes complete sense. So it’s, it’s, I can understand it from my frame and I think you can understand it from my frame. I don’t, I don’t know that I completely understand what you’re talking about from your frame. Well, no, and that’s, that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s the goal here, right? I mean, what is, what is, what is your goal? What are you, what are you trying to accomplish with your YouTube channel and you’re just talking about this kind of stuff? So what I’m noticing in the world is a breakdown. There’s a breakdown going, happening. There’s a fragmentation of identities. There’s a fragmentation of, of all the places which, in which we find our communion, in which we find unity are breaking down. And people are just surfing through surfing as if this is normal. But at some point, it’s going to move towards more chaos, riots, all of this stuff, the chaos that we see that we saw in 2020. And it’s also going to move towards authoritarian clampdowns, because one of the problems that happens when normal identity starts to fragment is that there’s an overcompensation on the other side. And so what I’m seeing down line is very dark. There’s a very dark horizon. And one of the reasons why it is, is because we’ve ceased to understand what makes things exist as one. Like, why do we think that nations have identity? Why do we think families? Why do we think a person has unity? And this is because we’ve lost the cosmic frame. We’ve lost the frame, this traditional hierarchy of being, which is shown in the temple, in the church, in the story of Genesis, and all of these images that help us to understand and participate in how things are one. Jordan talks about this all the time, which is the problem of, John Brevicki uses the words, combinatorial explosion. There’s too much stuff in the world. There’s just too much phenomena. And so there are ways in which phenomena coalesces into identities, in which you’re able to see that a chair has parts, but is also one. Why do we think that a chair is one thing? It’s not one thing, it’s a million things. And why do you think that that chair participates with other furniture, and we can see it as one room? And why do we see one room as one house, or one house as one? You know, all these houses as one city, there are processes by which this is possible. And if we attack ritual, and we attack the notion of concentric spaces, or the idea of the way in which society communes, then it’s going to become the suburbs. All of reality is going to become the suburbs. It’s going to become a flat distribution of particles that have no coherence. It’s going to happen in the way we build houses. It’s going to happen in our morality, where everybody has their own morality. It’s going to happen in our identities, where everybody has their own identity. And there’s nothing joining us together. And we’re going to not know our neighbors, which is already happening. We don’t know our neighbors, we don’t know the people next to us. We have nothing binding us. There’s no glue. And that glue is ritual. It’s based on concentric, it’s based on worshiping the same thing. No, I agree. We have to celebrate the same thing in order to be together. This is Jordan Peterson’s idea of God. God is the thing that you orient yourself towards. And different communities orient themselves towards different things. Like I would say the social justice community is oriented towards fighting for the rights of the oppressed. That is technically their God, because that’s what they’re orienting themselves. The anti-theists, they orient themselves towards the world would be a better place without religion. That is their God. That is the God that they serve every day with every video that they make. They’re trying to turn everyone else into anti-theists. Well, actually, and by extension into scientists, because they worship truth. They think religion is bad because it doesn’t worship truth over well-being. Even though it’s funny that- Or they worship factuality is what they worship. But you said one thing I think I want to go back to. You see fragmentation as a problem. I’m torn over whether or not the fragmentation is due to material conditions or whether it’s due to a philosophical breakdown. I think there’s good arguments for both. They go together. Yeah, they do. They kind of feed off of one another. That’s why Christianity has an ascetic aspect to it. The idea that we accumulate all this stuff, we think that it’s good in itself. See, that’s where the philosophy shapes the material conditions. Because if you’re living in horrible material conditions, it’s helpful to have a philosophy that makes you enjoy not having anything. Monks could live in very lavish conditions. They wanted to. They choose not to. Monasticism is a voluntary choice. It’s not caused by the outside world. It’s the ascetic spirit of Christianity can flower even in the empire. Even if when Constantinople was the most glorious city in the world, there were still monks standing on pillars and living in caves. So the ascetic tendency is not just based on a lack of material possibility. There’s something else in the ascetic thing. But I just want to say one thing about what you said in terms of the gods. I think you’re right. They really are gods. One of the problems we’re seeing, one of the things we saw in the last few thousand years is through Christianity, through Islam, through Judaism, through Neoplatonism, and other versions of tradition, some aspects of Hinduism, like let’s say Vedanta Hinduism, there’s this idea that the gods stack up. The identities of these different things, they stack up. They stack up towards something which moves towards a point. You could call that point being. You could call it the origin. There’s all ways of talking about it, but they stack up. So it’s like you have modes of being. Let’s say that social justice god, the god of war, the god of money, the god of this. You have all these gods and they’re all competing. They’re competing in society, but they’re also competing in you. You have desires. Not me. Those desires are fighting amongst each other and you can feel the same. You can feel two at the same time, right? Yeah, definitely. You love someone and hate them at the same time. It’s ripping you apart. Let’s say the Christian answer, and it’s not just a Christian answer, but there’s a way to unite those into a single mode of being which unites all other modes of being. That’s the movement towards the transcendent god. Who is not like all the other gods. The kind of weird atheist argument, which is that everybody’s an atheist. You just believe in one more. I just one less god than you do, right? No, that’s not true. I believe in all the gods. I think all the gods exist, but the infinite transcendent is not the same as all these particular gods. Just like in order to unify the different cities in the United States, you need an identity which is higher, which is the state. And if you want those states not to fight amongst each other, you need an identity higher, which is the country. And so you need these transcendent identities in order to unify things below them. So in the context that I said, an idea can become a god in the sense that it’s some idea that a community orients around. Social justice, we talked about. Anti-theism, we talked about. What would be the central idea that Christianity rolls around? I have my idea, but my idea is through an evolutionary framework, obviously. But my idea is through an evolutionary framework, obviously. So but your idea and everything that you’re saying, I don’t disagree with anything that you’re saying. I’m just I’m kind of translating it into an evolutionary framework in my mind. I think it’s love. Love. Yeah. Okay. And so what love does is that it is the balance of the unity and multiplicity. Let’s stop. Love is when you can have, let’s say, unity amongst people, but that unity doesn’t dissolve the difference, the multiplicity. You know, it’s like if you love someone, you don’t like suck them into you. You don’t like, you know, just like the way that you like to eat something, that type of desire. That’s not what Christian love is. You don’t make everything the same through love. There’s a recognition of the unity and also recognition of the multiplicity at the same time. And it creates this kind of balance or this dance between one and many. And I think that that’s the highest value of Christianity. And it manifests itself in the incarnation where Christ is seen as both fully transcended, fully God, fully, you know, and at the same time, fully incarnate, fully multiple, fully linked down all the way down into death. You know, and so it’s like there’s this joining of absolute fragmentation and multiplicity all the way to death with the ultimate transcendent principle. You’re expert at talking in the metaphorical truth frame. Like so much of this is, I can see this driving. Does that sound like I’m just spouting gibberish? I hope I’m not. A little. It’s I can understand it and respect it because I respect the idea behind metaphorical truth. But I think a lot of like scientifically minded types, it sounds like gibberish too, because they don’t, they can’t necessarily grab on to it into, in a like a materialist type framework. You are talking about hierarchy. Let me use a scientific example. Okay. Right. And so you have a transcendent principle, right? That’s you could call it a theory. Okay. So it’s like the theory of evolution. So that’s like, yeah, you have a pattern, right? Selection, variation, reproduction. It doesn’t matter which one it is. Any scientific theory will do. And that is a pattern. And that what that pattern does is first of all, it tells you what to look at because you could look at a million things in the world. Sure. Totally. So the theory, first of all, frames what you’re talking a little slice of reality. It frames the slice. And then it also gives you the parameters by which the pattern of this thing is going to happen. Okay. So that’s the heaven of that scientific thing. And then there’s also a earth, a lower part. That’s all the multiplicity of facts which you encounter. All the variety of facts. That the pattern creates in sort of a fractal type sense. Yeah, but it doesn’t just create them. It also kind of, let’s say it has to recognize them also. It’s not just about creating them because those facts have a way of speaking. And sometimes the facts will start to contradict the theory. And so then you have to find a way to balance the theory with the facts. Correct. If it’s not balanced, then either the theory will like start to crush the facts and will start to suppress the facts that it doesn’t like so that it will continue to make the theory look plausible. So it’ll start to marginalize facts. This is where the metaphorical truth comes in right here. This is what happens, right? Well, definitely. Yeah. It’s not metaphorical. It’s like this is scientific. So you have facts and you’re looking at them through your theory, but some of them don’t fit. If a few of them don’t fit, that’s fine. You kind of leave them to the side. If a lot of them, you start to push them, push them, push them. At some point, the theory is overturned. It’s going to split apart. And the theory and the facts just won’t fit together anymore. Correct. Yes. Reality will stop to be coherent. What they do in science though is they throw the theory away. They say, okay, we need a new theory. Yeah. You need a theory which is more… Explains these facts better, these new facts. Exactly. But when the theory and the facts are together and there’s a balance between the unitive capacity that the theory offers and the variation at the bottom, that’s love. See, and then you go to something that’s completely subjective. Love is not subjective. Love is subjective. Well, there’s different types of love. There’s like love that you have for your family and then there’s love that you have for like your wife, which is… Well, let’s use the Christian agape love. There’s love that you have for your brother. That’s the one that I’m talking about when I thought about Christian love. There’s love that you have for your friends. I don’t disagree on the love thing, but there’s a specific aspect of the love in Christianity. One of the reasons why I think Christianity has dominated the world and has so many adherents and so many people… Going back to the example that I have of those 10 tribes, the 10 guys with a superior ethical system that could beat 100 guys, that ethical system of Christianity is spread around the world because it’s so incredibly useful, especially in modern times. One of the hardest things to do in society is to foster an attitude of forgiveness. Forgiveness makes the modern world possible. A lot of accidents happen. A lot of terrible things go on. If people aren’t able to let go of those terrible things, they can consume a lot of their resources, a lot of their family resources, a lot of their individual resources, a lot of their tribe’s resources. We have a lot of contention going on in politics and whatnot. Until somebody has the capacity to step up and say, okay, let’s start over. I’m going to forgive everything that’s happened up until then, and I encourage you to do the same. Let’s move forward with a fresh slate. Things can go off the rails. This is how genocides happen, right? Things spin in the wrong direction. But the center of the Christian narrative is a dude on the cross doing this grave act to forgive the world for all of the injustice in it. So that is a powerful idea. It definitely plays into the love thing that you’re talking about, but it’s more specific than that because it does take an extreme type of love to forgive your enemies. Like, it’s easy to love your neighbor, love your family, love your friends, but to love the guy across the street that’s been a pain in your ass as long as you’ve lived there, that’s an extreme type of love. And I think the Christian narrative. There’s a key in that, like the love your enemy thing. It’s important to understand it is that one of the problems of reality is that these hierarchies, let’s say the hierarchies of tribalism, the hierarchies of identity, they’re inevitable. You can’t avoid them. They have to exist or else the world stops to exist. The world ceases to exist. And so how do you deal with it? And so a lot of the Christian answers are something like that, which is love your enemy. And so love your enemy doesn’t mean he’s not your enemy. It’s not saying this person’s not your enemy. It’s saying this person is your enemy, but you have to find it in yourself. And you could still defend yourself actually. Like in terms of Christian understanding, in terms of a country, like no Christian country would ever say you need to let yourself get invaded by other countries. But the idea is you need to also be able to continue to see the humanity of even the person that’s attacking you and to see that they share something in common with you, even though they are your enemy. And so those are the kinds of answers that Christianity gives, which are based on finding a balance between the unity and multiplicity, like this finding this space where you have the best relationship between the tribal aspect and also this openness towards the outside. All of this is manifests itself in the incarnation. So you said one thing also in your previous talk that I didn’t quite understand because the argument that you seem to be making is, which I completely agree with, the only way that you can really change a system or group or an identity or a community is from within. And the implication that you made was the really you need to join Christianity and help change Christianity from within. But that argument applies to any group. I completely agree with you that the only people who are going to listen to you are people within your tribe. Other people will tend to dismiss you. But that attitude also applies to communism, which I wouldn’t advise anyone to join the communist community and improve it from within. Yeah, well, communism is deficient at the outset. It’s not the same at all. Like trying to put communism on the same level as traditional religious systems is just really hogwash. It’s just not. It really isn’t. But do you do understand? We’re in agreement, though, that you can conceptualize religion as a thing that people orient around. And communism is a thing that people orient around and therefore can be conceptualized as like a Durkheimian view of religion can be conceptualized as a religion. It’s like social justice can be conceptualized as a religion. Everything can become a religion. Money can become a religion. That’s why we have the idea of idolatry in Christianity. Money. Specifically, I’m talking about a goal or a cause that a community orients itself around. So making money like I don’t know that money itself can become a religion, but like I would conceptualize any corporation that works together to make money by doing some service or product could be conceptualized as a religion, not necessarily. We could understand that the god of our system is money or mammon, and the god of the communist system is this weird equality thing. They worship equality. And then they want to make the world in the image of equality. And it’s actually probably worse than the other one because it obviously itself destroys in just a few generations. Communism just doesn’t have legs. It’s as soon as you put it together, it’s self-destruct. I don’t want to get sidetracked on communism because I could very easily. But the argument that you’re making, I didn’t understand. And I think other people, if I didn’t understand it, other people didn’t understand it. So maybe you could make it clearer. What exactly are you advocating for? You have to understand it in the general context of what I said I did, wasn’t able to communicate properly, which is that I have a cosmic mythological frame in which I exist and participate and I live in. Now you’re standing somewhere and you’re telling me there are aspects of your mythological, your aspects of what you’re doing, which is wrong. And my question is, okay. I’m saying that about you? No, no, like the critique of the new atheist, let’s say, the critique of the atheist type, which is that this practice of Christianity is wrong. Because it’s factually incorrect. Yes. Well, it’s not about prescriptions that are not factual descriptions. Well, no, but I’m just saying that’s what their critique would be. Their critique would be you believe untrue things, believing untrue things is dangerous because the next thing you know, you’re a suicide bomber. Like that’s basically their argument. No, am I wrong? I mean, that’s basically their argument. They’re like, if you can be tricked, I’m like, everyone believes untrue things. You can’t get out of bed without believing untrue things because there’s things that you don’t have the facts on. And there’s also, this is the thing is that this is what, we’re getting sidetracked again, but there are, this is going to be hard for people to understand, which is that there are truths which are more immediate to you than scientific truths. Scientific truths are actually abstractions most of the time. Are you a fan of Donald Hoffman? Do you? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I’m a huge Donald Hoffman fan. So when Donald Hoffman and Vervek are really going at the same kind of ideas from different perspectives, Vervek is more on the philosophical side and Donald Hoffman is more on the scientific side. So I agree with you. He makes a mistake. He makes a mistake in his original premise, which is fine because he’s a scientist, but he makes a mistake in his original premise, which is that we experience illusions and there is this other thing behind, which is more true than what we experience, but we can’t experience it. And I’m like, okay, I don’t know. Why don’t you posit your experience as the first frame and then the rest as secondary? So like the experience that we have, that’s all our meaning is made out of it. Like all our meaning is made out of that experience. And so I’m not saying that scientific truths are untrue. Of course, they’re true, but they’re secondary to that first experience. Like you don’t experience H2O. You drink, you experience wet, you experience cold. These are the first categories and they’re not subjective. They’re personal, like because they’re human experiences, but everybody has similar, it’s a universal personal experience, but you don’t experience molecules. You don’t experience atoms. You don’t experience the solar system. Like all of these things are abstractions from your experience and they’re useful and they’re valuable, but they come after the first experience. Well, Donald Hoffman would say, yes, it’s all experience. So I don’t disagree with you there. Just to bring it back to the Christianity thing, do you believe the world would be a better place if everyone was Christian? Is that your position? If I believe that the world would be a better place if everyone was Christian. That’s kind of the implication when you say, you know, I have this frame of reference. We have the best way of looking at the world. What I mean is that I have this frame and I have ways of knowing what’s good inside of it and I have these ways of making it better. And you standing in a place that I don’t know where you are, like let’s say in my discussion with rationality rules, he’s standing in a place that I don’t know where he is. He’s talking to me about a good that he won’t define, yet he’s telling me that I should improve my thing. It’s like I don’t know what you want from me. Like where should I go? Tell me where to stand. Tell me where to, tell me what’s your frame and then, and help me understand it so that I can evaluate. But for now, like this seems way superior to whatever it is you’re offering me because you’re offering me something which is vague and imprecise and a good that I can’t really identify. And so it’s like, this is where I am. I’m speaking out of, I know what I’m speaking out of. Like I know what my frame is, but I don’t think you do. D.J. The major contention that came out of the dialogue there was over the LGBT stuff. He was basically saying, you have an ethical package that 5% of the population can’t use because they’re homosexual and the ethical package castigates their entire lifestyle. So the ethical package is unavailable to them. Yeah, I know. I think that my difficulty with that is several fold. Well, he would say change your ethical package. He would say make your ethical package inclusive of homosexual lifestyles and we’re having a conversation. What about bestiality lifestyles? He wouldn’t say that because obviously the truth. What about bestiality lifestyles? See, that’s just what aboutism. No, it’s not what aboutism. We just literally said what about. No, but what I mean is that if you have to give me a reason why to change it. I don’t disagree that 20 years from now, 20 years from now, there’s an indefinite amount of patterns of behavior that exist. And those indefinite amounts of patterns of behavior can also say, why don’t you accept my behavior? Well, my understanding of the world is there are different strokes for different folks, different people will utilize different ethical packages more successfully. I think we’re in a better situation if we have 10, 15% of the population that are atheist scientific types. Why are you laughing? I’m dead serious. If we have 10, 15% of the population, when you have a football team, you have an offense and a defense, right? You have different positions for different people. You can’t form a football team if everyone is a quarterback. That team is not going to be successful. But I see a lot of our ancient software is if we don’t go kill the tribe over the hill, they’re going to come and kill us. Therefore, we’re in a safer world if everybody is the same as us. That’s ancient, ancient primal programming. A lot of the disagreements that I see online are people just advocating for their tribe saying, I would feel much safer in a world where everyone was Christian, or I would feel much safer in a world where everyone was LGBT, or I would feel much safer in a world where no one believed in religion because they might become a suicide bomber and end up on the bus that I’m on. This is really the dialogue that we’re having. But really, the system that we need to work on, I think Brett Weinstein is brilliant in illuminating this fact, the system that we need to work on is a system that interfaces between the ethical packages. In certain ethical packages, you have kill all apostates, kill anyone who’s not inside our group. That’s a bad thing because that ethical package becomes caustic to the rest of the ethical packages. It’s helpful to have 10 to 15 percent of the population that’s atheist scientific types working on medical advancements that everybody benefits from. They don’t necessarily believe in evolution, but when they show up at the hospital, they have help. There’s help for them. There’s help for them and their family. What is your position on that multiplicity of ethical packages? So this is the thing. This is also in terms of… First of all, like I said, one of the difficulties that religion is not first and foremost an ethical package. It is a communal package. It’s a package which makes us know that we are in communion with each other, that we have things in common that help us to see each other as together. You could see it that way. Everything that you’re saying goes along with my beliefs. Maybe the term ethical package is incorrect. In that, there’s a hierarchy of practices. Sure. Yeah. So there are things which are high up on the normative ladder and there are things which are low on the normative ladder and there are things which are considered sinful. Now, the thing about the sinful part is that everybody sins. It’s not like there’s a particular type of person that sins and everybody else doesn’t. Sin is just a normal part of reality. So the idea that certain behaviors are prescribed as sinful doesn’t mean that they don’t exist because everybody sins. That’s one of the aspects of Christianity is to say, don’t judge your name, don’t judge the other because you also have that in you. The way that you’re framing this is completely offensive to the atheist. I want you to know. It’s so much better though because you don’t have the totalitarian move in what I’m saying. There’s no totalitarian move because you can’t say… So are you saying now that the atheist… I’m talking about the peaceful cohabitation of the atheist tribe and the Christian tribe and you’re saying the atheist tribe is always going to become totalitarian? No, not always. How is that? Not always. Just 40% of the time, 50% of the time? No, no, no. What I mean is that the idea of having a normal hierarchy of normativity is the way that you kind of deal with this stuff. And so the idea is that there… So let’s say internal sexuality. Traditional Christian sexuality is radical. It is very radical. It says all sexuality, even your thoughts, has to be geared towards a monogamous relationship which is in the pattern of procreation. Yeah, that’s a great… How can you not see the evolutionary advantage of that? Right, exactly. And also, everybody sins. So everybody falls short of that. Everybody. No one doesn’t fall short of that. And so that’s the way that Christians have approached it. And so the idea that in Christian societies, there are always behaviors which go outside of that goal is just normal. It’s just going to happen. So homosexual behavior has always been part of Christianity. Adultery has always been part of Christianity. Masturbation has always been part of Christianity. It was prescribed, but it was also understood that everybody is tainted by it. Everybody has that… Framing it though as sin as something that is… Missing the mark. Framing it as sin though is offensive to people who don’t view it as sin. They have a different ethical package. What’s the mark of sexuality? Well, listen… In an evolutionary term, what’s the mark? When do you hit the bullseye? When you read… Grandchildren. There you go. Yeah. So missing the mark means going aside from that. But they would argue that they live in a society where it’s not necessary for every single person to be churning out children and that they might live a more meaningful life to them if they forego having children and have a same-sex marriage or even not have a same-sex marriage, but screw around with every single person that they come in contact with. Maybe that’s their beautiful life, their thriving life. There always have been people who do that. Yeah, but they aren’t welcome inside the Christian… They aren’t welcome inside the Christian church though. You think prostitutes don’t go to communion once a year? Well, okay. We’re getting away from my point here. No, it’s important. It’s a really important… It’s because we’re so used to weird totalitarian systems where we think that everything which is illegal, there’s going to be a cop at your door putting you in jail. But in normal societies, that’s not how it works. The fact that there are prescribed actions doesn’t mean that they are all enforced through the force of police state. If a person wants to live a LGBT lifestyle, have a same-sex marriage, maybe adopt kids even, if they become a part of Christianity, I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be a comfortable fit for them. I mean, I have friends that are gay and Catholic and just love it. So I mean, it’s definitely not outside the realm of possibility. I’ve seen it happen. But it becomes a private question. It becomes a question of private life and a private relationship with your priest, with your confessor. It becomes something which is not in the normative prescription of the system. But like I said, we all have those. Everybody has those things that aren’t normative. It has entered the public sphere though when you have laws against gay marriage being funded by the Mormon church. So it definitely does enter the public space in ways that are not necessarily good in a utilitarian way for everyone. Well, that depends. What exactly is the purpose of gay marriage? The purpose of gay marriage is for people for freedom, liberty, people to be able to pursue the lifestyle that they want. The whole reason that we’re able to have- What is the purpose of marriage? What was the traditional purpose of marriage? The buddy system. Well, in the modern- No. No, the traditional purpose was to have kids, but it’s changed over time. Now it’s more the buddy system. It’s so you have someone that you can share your life with. So it’s basically living together with a contract? Is that- Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, contract. You’re not going to leave me. It’s the buddy system. You understand that marriage can function in different ways as well, right? Christianity has a specific way of defining marriage that works for Christianity. That way of defining marriage is not going to work for everyone. What I’m saying is it’s better to have a world where we have different groups that pursue different avenues of thriving, and those groups have a system for interacting with one another that doesn’t end up in genocide. I agree with the last part, for sure, in terms of not ending up in genocide. But you also have to be careful not to create a system that is so diverse that it’s like chocolate pudding, and then someone’s going to come in with a knife and cut you up. I’m not convinced that if the shoe was on the other foot and the LGBT community had the numbers, that they wouldn’t genocide the Christian community. I’m not convinced that that wouldn’t happen. They can’t have the numbers. They can’t have the numbers because the LGBT is like 5% of the population. Yeah. No, but I’m saying the LGBT community is worried about the Christians genociding them. They have reason to. My goodness. Yeah. Okay. So we’re in agreement. I totally agree. Look, I think that a lot of the stuff that we’re seeing now is because of an excess of insane regulation that happened in the 1950s and the early 20th century, like chemically castrating people and putting people in jail and all this insane stuff that happened in terms of attacking people’s lifestyles. I think that that’s crazy. I think that that is what led to the movement. And so I have a lot of sympathy for what happened. I totally understand. I think that in the normal traditional world, there’s a lot more flexibility for people to live out their idiosyncrasies. And there isn’t this weird police state enforcement of people’s private lives. Like I said, traditional society has always had prostitutes. Prostitution is just part of, you can prescribe it and then also not enforce it. It just happens. It is part of society. You say that’s taboo, but it’s still going to be there. And that’s the same with all kinds of other behaviors, which have always existed from all time. And so I think that the modern clampdown on the pathologization of homosexual behavior, which happened actually with scientific reasons, led to a crazy backlash. It was actually more the scientists that ended up castrating homosexuals than the Christians. All the behavioral psychologists, all of these people who said that it was a disease that needed to be cured. That’s a modern phenomenon. It’s not an ancient phenomenon. The system, the thing that I’m talking about, the system for interaction between systems, I think Christianity has an advantage on developing that system because it has the one ethic that is important, that must be in this system to system management ethics package, basically. And that is the love thy neighbor or love thy enemy thing. Because if there’s any conflict between those tribes, like the tribalism is so embedded in our psychology that that tribalist program takes over so quickly that if you don’t have that forgive the enemy ethic involved in your ethics package, there’s no way that you can stop that. Like we’re down the road to the next genocide. So these are the things that I think Brett Weinstein is talking about a lot. I think rationality rules was talking about in your conversation with him, but not necessarily as specifically as I’m talking about them. Yeah, but you would need to… So if you want to create something which navigates… A super system. Let’s call it the super system. The problem with the super system is that it’s brought about by people who aren’t aware that the system is not arbitrary. Nobody’s driving the ship now, John. Exactly. And so I’m afraid of anybody who wants to place themselves above the systems. Like I’m really afraid of that because they have a blind side. They’re blinded by something and they think that they can stand outside and judge everything else. We want the right people in charge of it. I totally agree with you. Well, actually, it’s better if we don’t have anyone in charge of it. I believe in institutions. We need to build institutions that allow terrible people, that basically force terrible people to do the right thing. We want an institution that’s strong enough that even if terrible people grab the reins, there’s not too much damage that they can do. Building institutions is the important thing. Well, for sure, the US system, at least what seems like that’s what it was made for, it seems to have lasted for a while. It might be stretched to its limit. Don’t talk like that. We’re doing just fine down here. You’re doing just fine. Okay, that’s good. Sorry. I’d have to stop paying attention to what’s being said on Twitter. That’s for sure. I only have about 15 or 20 minutes left, but I want to talk about something before we go because you’re in a very famous video with Jordan Peterson. I think it’s Brett Weinstein where Brett Weinstein makes an argument. You guys never really get back to the argument. I don’t think Brett Weinstein even finishes the argument, but the argument is what we’re talking about. Science is the super system because science is the way that we mitigate between the other systems. I don’t know that I totally agree with that. Science is a component of the super system, but the super system has to have a moral component as well. We both know where science falls down. Science is not prescriptive, but descriptive. It’s descriptive. Yeah, exactly. But the super system needs to be proscriptive. Obviously, all of our ethical packages are proscriptive. That’s the whole point of the ethical package. Yeah, it has to be able to identify the good towards which it’s aiming. Yeah, so in that talk, just to sum it up, you’re talking about the various systems. Christianity is one of the systems, but Brett Weinstein makes the argument that science is the highest, the top of the hierarchy. I know one of your things is hierarchy, so I could see, oh, he’s getting triggered here. He doesn’t like this. It has to be. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think that a good way to understand science. Let’s give the background a little more for people who haven’t necessarily heard it all. You were there. What exactly happened there? It was mostly about this idea of the problem because I did a video on the idea of metaphorical truth because Brett made a video on metaphorical truth where he talked about how he was saying that science is the higher truth. Science is above the other truth. I was trying to point into him the performative contradiction, which is that he was using metaphor to make science higher. I was joking in the video. I said, I looked at it on the top shelf of my room and I couldn’t find science. It just wasn’t there. If I stack science on top of a pile of other things, if you go down into the materialist scientific frame, this idea of a hierarchy just doesn’t make any sense. Your argument is that if you’re going to make an argument that science is higher than metaphor, you’re literally using a metaphor to make that argument, which makes sense. So you’re saying metaphors are you saying, but I don’t necessarily understand because I understand Brett’s argument. Brett’s argument is there are all these ethical systems. They all believe different and contradictory things. Science is the only one that can discern truth among those things in a materialist way. Therefore, if truth is really what you’re looking for, because there’s also well-being, one system may be terrible at truth, but they are very good at well-being. The people who live there are very happy. None of them believe anything in the real world, but they’re so happy. They’re producing kids. They’re thriving over time. One of the things that I’m always talking about is one of the ironies of the world is where truth and well-being often diverge. The antithese community, they want to see truth and well-being be on the same page, but that’s not necessarily how the world works. You understand the argument that Brett is making. You’re just making it technical. I definitely disagree. Okay, so how do you disagree? That’s it. I disagree because the jump between different levels of all reality is not a scientific jump. You have to take a category for granted before you analyze it. The analysis of a category will not give you the category. But you analyze it how? Because Brett would say… Science is taking bounded phenomena and then giving a description, which is good enough so that maybe you can predict what’s going to happen. So you bound a phenomena and then you describe it in a way that is so good that then you can actually predict other versions of it or how it’s going to act, let’s say. How it’s going to continue. So that is what scientific things do. But the category of a car is not a scientific category. You need the category first before you analyze the car. You need the category of a mountain before you analyze a mountain. The world is fluid. The boundaries between phenomena are permeable. But there are different ways to analyze a category. There are different ways to analyze a category. But science, all it does is analyze the categories. For truth. For truth. But the categories are not scientific themselves. Science only analyzes for materialist truth claims. That’s all it analyzes for. It analyzes for factuality. But it doesn’t give you even the categories. It’s like a river is a category of meaning. So if you’re going to study what lives in a river, why do we think that species are that a species are it’s like why do we think that species we have arbitrary not arbitrary we have meaningful ways of differentiating species but those are not in the you can’t find them in the the actual analysis of the category. What would be your rebuttal? What would be your argument? So or your rebuttal to Brett’s argument. So if Brett is saying that science is the only way that you can study how the study the truth claims between the various ethical systems or religions, whatever you want to call them. And he’s saying that’s why that’s the that is the defining factor of science over the different systems. What you’re saying no science is you’re saying what is what is the highest is at the bottom of the hierarchy but in a good way okay not in a bad way at the bottom of the hierarchy in a very good way because what it does is it helps you understand how things work right and so for example like the top let’s say a car at the top of the of a interacting with the car is why does the car exist like it’s to go you need to drive transportation is higher in the hierarchy transportation is higher than understanding how it works driving the car is higher in the hierarchy than understanding how it works if you don’t understand how it works obviously you’re going to have a problem driving it but the reason why you even want to understand how the car works is because you have a goal you have a you have a utility yeah utility so what and so that’s that’s what i think is higher it’s just inevitably higher on any hierarchy of meaning has to be purpose and goal and and the frame of you know the the category itself that you’re then using science to to to decipher but those categories are meaning categories they’re not they’re not you know you you don’t this is the problem of emergence you can’t you can’t get to the higher level being just by analyzing its parts lay it cannot lay out the hierarchy here with well there’s christianity is is a system of interacting between people like an identity of of like you say of a way that you’re going to interact with the world and with other people in christianity and other people outside of christianity like there’s rules in christianity for that as well uh scientology is a different way of interacting with people and well it’s it’s just one of the packages out there and science is a is a different way of interacting with people and and the world there is a hierarchy there that brett weinstein would say science is at the top of the hierarchy because science can explain the workings of christianity and of scientology in a way that scientology cannot explain the workings of science and christianity what if this simple hierarchy of three things where you’re saying science would be at the bottom of that hierarchy and christianity would be above it but where does scientology fit in that hierarchy the the thing that’s above the hierarchy is the is the logos it’s not christianity okay so that’s what i want to get at right there so what’s above what is above all science scientology and christianity what is that thing well the divine logos like the divine logos is the is the reason and origin and end of things and those those that you could see it as the highest version but that scales down all the way down to anything you can identify and so any every category in terms of every category has a an unitive aspect to it right has something which makes you know that it’s one right even though it has parts okay okay and so i know that that’s hard it’s so i know we have to dumb it down to atheist speak here you have to give me the materialist version of it okay because i understand how metaphors work i okay so it’s not a metaphor it’s not a metaphor in the in the simple sense so so let’s say let’s say you you um it’s it’s harder for smaller things because people because they see them physically together so a chair is a good example so there a chair has parts right yeah oh and those parts also have parts yeah no it’s a conceptual category also have parts okay so why do you think that a chair is one thing a well it’s based on the utility of the chair obviously once once a certain amount of matter coalesces in a way that it has a certain utility we start categorizing it by that utility i’m you’re talking to a jordan peterson fan here like obviously the the we want the drill for what it does we want the hole that the drill puts in the wall you don’t care necessarily about the drill it’s about the utility right and so that that is not a scientific description right the you the reason why something exists is not is not is not a it’s not a scientific description of that thing you could you could bring it into a scientific description of something above it but not of the thing itself what is the what is the utility in categorizing the world this way because jordan peterson connects this way of categorizing things to evolution he says utility is what we’re geared to look for it’s the same thing that donald hoffman is talking about donald hoffman is saying you know we look at things by their evolutionary advantage they’re like a point system so we don’t look at them in a scientific way like we don’t look at the chair and say you know break it down to its parts we look at it as something that we can use to sit on yeah exactly but then that scales up like way up in the sense that it’s easy for a chair because the chair is physically you can see it as physically together but of uh let’s say the category of all chairs are not physically together what right but but all chairs share an identity like they they are a body and they have a logos which is above the individual chairs right and so that truth is higher than the analysis of what a chair is made of so you’re saying what’s at the top of the hierarchy is just the system that we categorize things by it’s the it’s the reason the ability to categorize things yeah yeah something like that you could i mean i could i could go that far the ability to see utility in things or the inevitability of seeing utility in things in the sense that that’s one of the reasons why they appear to us as categories in the first place right because because there is no there is no neutral reason to posit categories well that’s super interesting but i mean that is this thing that we do that we turn objects into utility like our people have said this for a long time like humans that’s what separates us from other animals now we realize that other animals use tools all the time i don’t see how you can look at the elaborate nests birds make and think oh yeah we’re the only species that uses tools yeah so but you’re i think logos logos definitely goes down into the chain of what is specifically what does logos mean specifically it just means it means the reason reason for things and the reason for things appear in the way that they’re ordered so it has to do with reason in the sense that we understand and so the the the order of something so the order of something is bound up in its reason right the the order of the chair is bound up in the reason why the chair exists correct yeah the utility that it has in the world man we’re making a utilitarian argument here it’s not a utilitarian argument it’s in my in my vision it’s more like a platonic argument because this this scales up in reality because the thing the the problem with the utilitarian argument is that it nonetheless posits a neutral reality is there anything above the category the category system in the hierarchy yes okay oh my god okay that’s what god does god is is beyond category god is infinite that’s the one why the reason why we say things like god is infinite or god is is beyond all name all definition because god is the darkness out of which the categories come from the this the divine darkness is god creates the categories god is the impetus behind the categories the god creates the categories through the logos that’s why we say in christianity we say you know i believe in one god the father almighty creator of heaven and earth and and it says that he created all things through the sun through the logos so god god doesn’t create directly because god is beyond all categories and so in in the in god there’s the there’s a principle of manifestation which then manifests the categories and so beyond everything it’s hard to talk about this stuff man it’s hard to talk about we don’t have to talk about it at a level that i hope like like i know that now at this point what we’re talking about people are going to say okay sky daddy fairy talk exactly totally no you’re on you’re on the right page sadly it’s good that you’re it is good john that you’re self aware to know to know this because a lot of people aren’t necessarily self aware they don’t even really know the other side’s arguments so they don’t know what the other side is thinking so think about it at at the chair level let’s go back to the chair right so you have a chair right this chair has an order it has a way for you to recognize that it’s a chair yes yeah right that’s that order is bound up in its purpose the way that the way that you recognize though is in your head it’s not in the chair correct what is the chair without the category well if you look at it like language we come up with different chair without the category it’s just a bunch of parts and then those parts are also made of parts just a quantum field without a category right but until somebody conceptualizes it as a chair and uses it for the utility i mean the category of chair is inside our heads it’s just i mean a rock could be a chair well rock can function as a as a seating place not really a chair but it could function as a okay so i thought you were talking more broadly like something to sit on like anything something to sit on that’s fine it doesn’t matter what the category is like it it they’re they’re hierarchies of categories you know and so they they all it’s a dynamic hierarchy of categories it’s not just they’re not just one one and and also objects going to have several identities they don’t have just one right and so you can when you if you if you take a rock and you throw it at someone it’s not the same it’s not the same thing as the rock you’re sitting on are you even it’s physically the same are you familiar with transformation which occurs when you pick the rock up and bash someone over the head yeah totally the utility changes like it changes categories as you use it soon the rock’s a hammer soon like soon the rock is a a sling it’s totally possible for that to happen the when you’re this comes off a bit like a pre-suppositionalist argument are you familiar with pre-suppositionalists no i’m not sure they have this argument and i’m i’m not super familiar with it either but their argument is that without a belief in god logic doesn’t exist so therefore if you’re using logic you’re basically admitting that god exists which i i don’t necessarily understand how they do the math on that one but this comes off a little bit like that like if you’re using this category system that i would argue is just innate in human psychology then you’re admitting that a god exists because the god the category system literally comes from god you’re saying god is the top of the hierarchy and the category system it’s not a mental it’s not a mental game it’s an embodied experience it’s not as simple as just saying what you believe in god or whatever it’s mostly that that you you so the the problem is always this positing of something which exists outside the category system like what is this other thing that you that you that you posit that exists outside the category system no i agree i agree the category system is like an innate goes all the way down it goes all the way down to potentiality but i would argue in a donald hoffman sense that the category system is part of our user interface with the world i would argue that it’s operating inside our head that it doesn’t actually but exists in the world to the other thing what’s that he he seems he posits another thing that he has no access to correct well he does have access to it but only through the user interface but he’s saying that the user interface strips out so much information just for people who are listening and they don’t know the donald hoffman argument donald hoffman really quick makes an argument that the real world is very different than the world that we see and understand that we have what is effectively a user interface a graphical user interface like you use with your computer many different operations are going on inside your computer than what we see on the depicted on the screen we all understand the screen of the computer very well and he postulates that all of science for as long as we’ve been studying the natural world all we’ve been studying is the screen the user interface and we’ve never looked inside the computer to what’s actually going on so what we’re talking about here is i’m saying that that category system is part of the user interface the screen and not necessarily uh i i i mean i don’t want to speak for you john are you postulating that god is what is inside the computer no i’m postulating that there well there is no other there’s only the screen no that’s not what i mean but what i mean is that you can posit as much as you want another reality that has that some kind of categories behind the screen but it’s always categories yeah i agree i agree through meaning well the like so the way to the categories are the categories are essential to us understanding the world as pixels are on the screen like if you don’t have pixels you don’t have a user interface so so the the aristotelian or even christian way of positing it would say that behind it is chaos potential it’s a potentiality and then out of and then logos light logos comes down on potentiality and then forms identities into that potential instead of those identities are the realest thing because the potentiality is just potentiality instead of chaos could you say raw materials you you could say raw i mean i guess if you want well but you’re saying all the way down to a potential possibility like it goes all the way down to a field of of of particles that are possibly somewhere right that are that are in flux let’s say we i’ve got to wrap it up i know you have a heart out too but this has been a fascinating we can talk again all right hopefully hopefully like but it’s not giving me hope that’s for sure man really oh yeah because i’m like i’m i’m i’m realizing just how hard it is to communicate certain things to people who haven’t had a certain intuition like it’s just really hard to communicate it’s like trying to find words in a language which is another language it’s difficult yeah i had i had one of my uh one of my fans watchers reach out to me and they really like your stuff they really wanted this conversation to happen so and they your stuff has been super meaningful to this person so i know that you’re making an impact on people and people people like your stuff and there are people that understand it i i guess one of my things is i’m just i’m trying to bridge that gap so many people see things that they don’t understand and they have just like a visceral disgust for it like they think that it’s a threat to their identity or or whatever it is and i i don’t i think that’s just a bad way to look at the world i think i mean you know obviously i um you’re a smart guy i’m trying to understand what you’re saying i you’re you’re well i do i it’s not like it’s completely a mystery to me and i feel like what we’ve articulated here has has been useful i mean obviously uh people leave comments on this people will there are people on your side that might be able to explain things better that are uh to sort of bridge that gap and same for you people on my on my side might be able to uh explain things a little more to you so well i hope so i hope so don’t get frustrated though why why don’t get frustrated seriously are you i think i’m frustrated with myself like i’m frustrated with the the the perception that there’s definitely like a wall and it’s like i and i know and i know that it’s a failure of my capacity to communicate it and so when i see the confusion in someone’s eyes i’m like damn like i can see in your eyes there’s no nothing wrong with confusion though like confusion is i mean that’s what’s wrong it’s annoying when you’re trying to explain something to someone and you see confusion in their eyes that’s why i’m obviously not explaining it the right way because then i wouldn’t see confusion in your eyes confusion confusion is how we begin any engagement with a new topic i mean it’s that’s normal that’s completely to be expected so the thing that bothers me is not the not not the fact that people are confused i the thing that bothers me is people are dismissive that’s what bothers me because there’s absolutely no attempt to even even understand so yeah that’s what bugs me well hopefully people won’t be too dismissive yeah well this was a great conversation all right i’m gonna talk to you man i’m gonna upload it to my channel i can send you a copy if you want to upload it to your channel too so well we’ll see yeah i mean upload it send me the link and and i’ll see how things go in the next few weeks okay take care man it was great talking to you all right bye bye bye