https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uzF7MX9nPbI
Think about what science does. Here’s all these disparate phenomena and I get have a unifying understanding. And then here’s two different theory. Here’s Darwinian natural selection. Here’s Mendelian genetics. And I get modern evolutionary theory, the grand synthesis, right? And why are scientists trying to find the ultimate? Yeah, and those are profound synthesis and they’re profound because they point to a deep underlying unity. Exactly, exactly. And this is the neoplatonic argument. And then you add in the argument I did at length in Ralston. If reality isn’t or if that fundamental grammar of intelligibility doesn’t conform to a fundamental grammar. Yes, right, right. We are doomed. We are doomed to a radical solipsism. So it’s not you can’t you I would argue and I would ask people to look at the longer argument at Ralston. But you can’t take the Kantian position that yes, that is the grammar of intelligibility. But reality is somehow fundamentally different because like just like Clark’s argument, different Clark, Samuel Clark. Like Kant presupposes the existence of other minds with an epistemology that gives him no way of acknowledging the existence of other minds. Why is he writing the damn critique if he doesn’t think why is he upset when he doesn’t get the reception? Because he believes that there are other minds, right? That and they and they’re real and they’re out there and he somehow has access to them and they have alternative frame. Right, so his implicit presuppositions and his explicit presuppositions don’t match. He’s in a performative contradiction. Yes, yes, yes. And so the neoplatonic argument is not the particulars, but the grammar of intelligibility and the grammar of reality have to ultimately. Okay, okay. So this is actually really why I wanted to talk to you today. So this issue here. So I did a lecture for Ralston as well at Ephesus on the Greek idea of the logos. Yes. Yes, so okay. So I want to I want to I want to ask you some questions about this and I suppose this has something to do possibly with neoplatonism and Buddhism and Christianity. Having a VPN is an important first step towards protecting your online privacy, but choosing a VPN you trust is equally as important. We here at DailyWire Plus choose ExpressVPN to secure our internet connection because unlike other cheap or free VPNs that make money by selling your data to advertisers, ExpressVPN has developed a technology that makes it impossible for their servers to store your data. ExpressVPN is the only VPN you can really trust. Plus using ExpressVPN doesn’t slow your internet connection. Their new lightweight protocol makes user speeds faster than ever. You can even stream HD videos with zero buffering. As complicated as all that might sound, ExpressVPN is incredibly easy to use. Just fire up the app and tap one button to connect. It’s no wonder why CNET, Business Insider, The Verge and many other tech journals rate ExpressVPN the number one VPN in the world. Protect your online activity with the VPN we trust here at DailyWire Plus. Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Jordan YT right now and find out how you can get three months of ExpressVPN for free. That’s EXPRESSVPN.com slash Jordan YT. ExpressVPN.com slash Jordan YT. We’ll open with a question about what might constitute this ultimate unity. Now you can think about it as a phenomenological unity in some sense and put it in the objective space. But I want to make a different case. So I think the ultimate unity is better conceptualized as something that you might term a spirit. And we can get into your description. Okay, so a spirit is an animating principle or a set of animating principles. And a universal spirit would be the same set of animating principles animating a lot of people simultaneously. So it’s like a meme in the Dawkins sense. It’s like a hyper meme. And so the question is, well, why should you conceptualize that as a spirit? So let me offer a proposition about what’s happening in the biblical corpus. So, okay, so there’s some attempt to specify the implicit unity. And the way the biblical corpus does that is by laying out a sequence of narratives. And the narratives stress a different ultimate unity. So, for example, in the story of Noah, here’s the unity that’s being pointed to. So you have Noah characterized as someone who’s a wise man for his time and place, which is all any all of us anything all any of us can hope for. Now, Noah has a intuition that the storms are coming and he has faith in the intuition and acts on it. And then God is characterized as the source of the intuition. And faith, in Noah’s case, is characterized as the willingness to abide by that intuition. That’s the story. Against all the people that are criticizing him. And against all other things that might occupy his attention. He prioritizes that. Yes, yes. Okay, so he meant that that’s how he manifests faith in it. That’s right. Okay, so now another story bumps up against that. And the next story is the Tower of Babel. And they’re very different narrative. And so what you have here is this. And this is actually related to this problem of criticality, but we won’t go into that. You have this proposition that human beings can build these towers of abstraction that can become totalitarian in essence. Right. And then God punishes that. Yeah, he just fragments it. He fragments it and makes people confused. Yeah. Okay, so now that’s a very different picture of God. The Noah God. Yeah. Okay, but they’re contiguous. Yeah. They call that metonymy. Yeah. So there’s an implication by juxtaposition that there’s an identity between those two different things. But they’re very diverse. Okay, so then I’ll just do two more of these. So then you have the story of Abraham. Yeah. Abraham is a slow starter. Right, so he’s very wealthy. His parents are wealthy. He lives a very privileged and sheltered life. But a spirit makes itself manifest to him. And the spirit is the call to adventure. So God in the Abrahamic story is the spirit that calls even the comfortable out to the catastrophic adventure of their life. Yeah. And that’s juxtaposed against these other two spirits. Then you have, let’s say, Moses. Now you have a different characterization of the ultimate unity. And the ultimate unity in the story of Moses is the unity that announces itself in the burning bush, but also the spirit that punishes the tyrant and that calls the slaves out of slavery. Yeah. Okay, so now… The open future, too. Meaning? The gods of Egypt are gods of location and function. The god of Moses and even more… So this is a development of the god of Abraham. The god of Moses travels with people through space and time into an open future that they… Right, right, right. Okay, and that’s a reference, as far as I can tell, back to the opening lines of Genesis. Because God characterizes himself at the beginning of the book of Genesis, I think, in terms that are very much akin to the terms we’ve been using to describe consciousness itself. Because God is the thing that confronts the pluripotential chaos. And that’s really, if you look at what… What’s the word? Teotihuabohu. That’s really what it means. It means pluripotential chaos, is something like that. He confronts that pluripotential chaos and generates the habitable order that is good out of it. And that’s the image of God in man. Those are identified as the same thing. And this is so crucial because it also implies… So one of the questions my students used to always ask me is, how do you know that what you’re teaching us isn’t just another ideology? Because I was trying to teach counter ideology. And that’s a really good question, right? It’s the question right now. It is the question. But imagine that you could have a story that concentrates on the process by which functional stories are generated. Well, this is what I wanted to say to you. I think what you’re getting… A spirit is something like a multiply realizable generative function. What I mean by that is you’re trying to find the through line. Each one of the… Think about… Remember I did the multi-dimensional opponent processing? Each one of these narratives is an opponent processing. Yeah, it’s Cain versus Abel. And there’s this and… But there’s also… There’s Egypt versus the promised land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Egypt is… Conflict. But Egypt is… Exploit the here now or explore the there then. That we talked about at the core of relevance. Remember they talk about the flesh pots of Egypt. But if we stay here, there’s so much we could just exploit. But you’re enslaved. Well, that’s what the Israelites get nostalgic about when they’re in the desert, too. Their immediate needs are no longer being gratified. And that causes them to become faithless and fractious. So what I’m suggesting to you is… I’ll just use the Exodus story, though. But all of them, I would argue. What myth is always doing or often doing… And Levi-Strauss had sort of a sense of this with structuralism. But what it’s doing is it’s pointing you to opponent processing. And then you can think of… Okay, here’s this myth with this opponent processing. Here’s this myth with this opponent processing. What’s the through line? And then what I do is I try to find… Like what you’re doing, what I was talking about earlier. You’re trying to find the multi-dimensional, like nexus, the through line of… The meta-through line. Yeah, of all the opponent processing. You’re trying to say, okay, all of the relevance realization… If I could do all the trade-offs… This is Nicholas of Cusa with his open sense of infinity. In the ancient Greek world, infinity is a bad thing. It’s chaos. But with Cusa, it opens up into… And then the whole Neoplatonic tradition into a positive thing. It’s like, no, no. If I could get all of the opposites, I would see that in infinity, they all coincide. The coincidence of the opposites. Right. And that would be the culmination, not in any entity. That would be sort of the summation of what our cognition is about. It would be sort of… I would have found the source of intelligibility, because I would have moved to the deepest grammar of cognition, which would get me… And that’s the resolution of all opposing conflicts.