https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KNEHlgo8YaM
So we live in a quantum universe. We don’t detect it because we’re kind of these macroscopic creatures, right? We’re sort of, you know, a couple meters characteristic scale. We live for, you know, tens of decades, hopefully. But we don’t live, you know, we don’t observe things at the nanosecond or picosecond scale. We don’t observe things at the femtometer size scale. So it’s kind of hidden to us by an averaging process that our brain… You’ve spoken about this many times. We have a foveal kind of attention that we pay to objects and beyond which we can’t really say anything other than vague notions about. So we can only focus on the foveal analogy to us is that we are focused on things that are our size. So it’s natural to think about that. We don’t see quantum tigers coming out of the vacuum and then disappearing, right? So our mind has to work and make analogies. So we analogize the universe today as being filled with quantum fields and then the particles are just instantiations of those quantum fields. So there’s a proton field over here that’s making this dust particle or this air molecule. There’s a photon field. There’s the particles of light, etc. Imagine the universe, the cosmos, as you know, is filled with an infinite tapestry of potentiality. It can be a photon over here or there may not be a photon over here. It depends on the value of that quantum field. So that’s so interesting, that idea of an infinite expanse of potentiality. Because potentiality is a very strange… what would you call it? Scientific materialist concept. Because only what’s real can be measured materially. But we need this hypothesis of something approximating an infinite potential. And you know, I don’t know if you know this about, I would say, my work, but it’s not just my work. It’s the entire corpus of symbolic thought. As insofar as that’s been interpreted, let’s say, by psychoanalytic thinkers, there is a cosmological hypothesis that permeates religious speculation that the cosmos that’s inhabitable, so the structured material world, is a manifestation of a multiplicitous potential. That’s chaos. That’s the infinite chaos, right? And so in Genesis, for example, there’s a process that looks to me to be akin to communicative consciousness that interacts with something approximating an infinite potential. That’s theom or tohu vabohu. Tohu vabohu, yeah. Exactly that, exactly that. And it’s that the order that is good is extracted out from this multi-dimensional… it’s not multi-dimensional, multi-potential field of potential as a consequence of the action of some structuring force, right? And that’s the cosmologically generative principle. And so it’s very interesting to me that in the realm of physics itself, which people consider the queen of sciences, that there is the notion of this expansive potential. And you associated that with quantum fields and also with the multiverse. And so, yeah, let’s walk through all of that. It’s even deeper than that, as you’re saying. The potentiality is something intrinsic to not only the existence of our universe, but there’s a mirror universe that you, I know, have been familiarized with with Sir Roger Penner. And that’s the anti-universe, the fact that we have antimatter. And it is possible to look at the work of Dirac. We talk about the Dirac Sea, where there’s an infinite set of potential states that are filled and occupied, or occupied, and depending on their potentiality versus their actuality, when do they get instantiated? When do they get commanded into existence, to use a very overburdened phrase, right? And there’s what’s called solid state physics or condensed matter theory. Imagine you have a bunch of people, a crowd, on a regular grid, and they’re all moving. And then one guy gets teleported by some aliens that we’ll have to talk about some other time. So one guy gets teleported out of this infinite grid of people marching as soldiers, right? And then the soldiers kind of get nervous, so they start moving to fill in that hole. So one moves to fill in the hole where the soldier has been extracted or rendered out of existence. And then that produces a hole in another place where that other soldier was, right? So there’s a sea of the hole. Now you start to see this hole moving. But is the hole real, Jordan? I mean, the guys are real, right? But now one guy left, and so they’re filling in. So now there’s this other thing called a hole, and it’s moving. And there’s an exact analogy between that and what’s called condensed matter physics that are called faux nons, not photons, but faux nons, and how they propagate. And they have properties. They travel at some speed. So now you’re talking about the absence of something, the potentiality of that which was, and it is propagating in a sea of possibilities as well. So I’m not even saying… So this sea of potentiality, my students and I tried to work through the relationship between anxiety and entropy. And we were contemplating the horizon of possibility, because I think that what people, what consciousness does is confront a horizon of possibility. It’s not something driven in an algorithmic deterministic manner by the states of material objects at the current time. It contends with the sea of potentiality. But it also appears, and maybe this is a consequence of the principles of existence itself, that that sea of probability is structured in a normal distribution of probability. So, for example, the most probable next event in our conversation is that one or the other of us or both will utter a word. But there’s some non-zero probability that there’ll be a cataclysmic earthquake and I’ll be swallowed up by the ground. Now, it’s a relatively low probability event, thank God, but it’s not zero and it’s not entirely predictable. Not in San Diego. It’s more higher probability. Exactly. Exactly. While in the cataclysmic events in our life occur when something that we deem of relatively low probability in this set of infinite potential actually makes itself manifest. And the more unlikely that event, according to our conceptual schema, the more anxiety is associated with it. But is there a sense among physicists that this infinite sea of possibility, you described it in relationship to Dirac’s thought, I didn’t know about that, is there some notion that some of those states are more likely to emerge given the current state than others? And is that a way of conceptualizing some alternative to determinism? Yeah, we actually had a concept that we could turn to probably in another topic. But Richard Feynman, one of the Titanic physicists of the last hundred years, came up with this kind of sum over histories or a path integral description by which particles get from A to B by sampling all paths in which they could possibly take, going from E to Dirac, but going the opposite way too. And those get weighted with different or lesser probabilities, to use the language that you were just saying. But I want to touch back one more to what you said. Feynman developed those. That’s right. That’s right. And so when you spoke about this anxiety, I want to, because I can’t resist, Jordan, as a podcaster myself, to, you know, how often do I have the chance to interview somebody like you? Even though this is your conversation, I want to continue with your questions. But there’s something that you said, and I hope again you’ll indulge me with your forbearance. You mentioned anxiety and entropy. I want to ask you right now, you know, how many different ways could I make your life twice as good? Like, or ten times as good? How many ways could I do that? I mean, it’s very limited. There’s a finite number of ways. Yeah, exactly. And there’s a, well, that’s a very good observation. That’s part of, I think, why we’re also weighted towards weighting negative emotion more significantly, is that the number of ways things can go wrong is near infinite, whereas the number of ways things can be improved is, that’s the straight and narrow path, right? That’s also, by the way, the boundary between order and chaos in the Daoist conceptualization of the world. It’s a very narrow pathway to make things better. It’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult. It’s not to make things, but I think Jordan and I want to run this by you. My theory is that you should lean into that which would devastate you. In other words, you and I are both parents. You’ve met my children. You know that, you know, the greatest fears, I don’t even have to speak it, you know, God forbid. But anyone who’s had brought a life into existence, has organized entropy, has reduced entropy, has invested so much into this beautiful creature miracle that we call a child. And that’s just one example of how your life could be made not twice as worse or ten times worse. It could be made infinitely worse. But I like to invert that and use that as a guiding principle and get your impressions about that. Because it seems to me that we should be doing those things and making those network entropic connections that we should have as many of them that they would, if removed, would devastate us. In other words, you can find out what you should be doing by… Well, OK, so one of the… I would say that that’s one of the most fundamental contributions of New Testament thinking to Old Testament thinking. It emerges in part as a consequence, you could say a narrative consequence of the conundrums that are brought forward in the Book of Job. So the Book of Job is a narrative description of the infinite numbers of potential ways you can profoundly suffer. And so Job is not only ill in the most terrible ways and innocently ill, but he’s ill in a way that loses… and he simultaneously loses his wife and his family. And then his friends make fun of him for being ill and accuse him of being sinful. That’s the reason for his illness. And so he’s at the bottom of the deepest possible pit. And he contends with God as a consequence, in some ways, attempting to negotiate with the divine to understand why it is that he’s being condemned to the suffering. Now, it turns out in that story that God made a bet with Satan, of all things, that if Satan tortured Job, or Job, that… He’d lose his faith. Job would lose his faith, right? So it’s a very strange story. But Carl Jung wrote a great book called Answer to Job that takes that apart in great detail. But what happens in the Christian story is a strange inversion of the story of Job, because the hypothesis in the Christian story is essentially that the best way through the absolute catastrophe of life is to voluntarily take on the deepest possible set of catastrophes as if they’re an encouraging challenge. It’s something like that. You could think about that metaphysically as the invitation to the cross. And so the notion is analogous to the notion that you’re describing, which is the best way to inoculate yourself against catastrophe is to confront it voluntarily. It’s the same idea, by the way, as the notion that the larger dragons hoard more gold. And the dragon gold story is a very, very old story. The notion there is that the best… What you could find that would manifest itself as the best in your life is likely to be found, as Jung said, in Sturkquilinus Inventur, which meant that which you most need will be found where you least want to look. Right. The cave that you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. I think Campbell’s… Exactly. Well, you know, in your life, one of the things you pointed out, and we’ll talk about this maybe in the Daily Wire interview, you had to deal with the loss of your father, which was a very dark thing to lose, a very dark thing to contemplate. And, you know, you said that one of the things you did as a consequence of contemplating that relatively forthrightly was develop a certain kind of radical ambition, both in terms of enthusiasm, because you were interested in it, but also in terms of the magnitude of the problem that you were setting out to challenge. And so you simultaneously solved a psychological and a metaphysical problem by delving into the structure of the real at the place that looked darkest and most mysterious to you. And I think that is it’s something everyone should know. I’d be lecturing to my audiences as I go around the world more recently talking about how destiny makes itself manifest to people. And it does that by inviting you with opportunities that seize your imagination. But it also does it by calling out to you certain problems that beset you that happen to be your problems, whatever that means. You know, because it’s not like it’s not like you’re obsessed by an infinite number of problems. You’re obsessed by that set of problems that happen for whatever reason to be your problems. And you might say, well, I wish I didn’t have any problems. But then you don’t have any mystery. The reverse of that would be to say, well, I’m going to take the worst problem that besets me and delve into that most assiduously. And I think the evidence is quite clear on the clinical front that that’s how you find the great adventure of your life. I think that’s a universal truth, by the way. Yeah, I think that’s and I see this with scientists. You know, the issue that, you know, that most people don’t really recognize is that science is done by scientists. You know, we’re not walking automatons that have no feeling and have nothing invested in it. And that’s why I think it was sort of like almost like a coming out, you know, feeling must be. I’m not familiar with it. But but liberation when you recognize your own particular dragon, if you’re willing to solve it. Look, I mean, you mentioned the mystery and what perplexes you. So if your car breaks down in the analogy used before, it causes you anxiety. But you know exactly what you have to do. You have to, you know, get a jack and you have to put a tire on and you have to get on your way. And hopefully you’ll be there on time. But but but you know what the path is, and it’s not that mysterious. I’ve been thinking about scientists. You know, we’re we’re confronted with an infinite spectrum of mysteries on a daily basis. And the rabbi Jonathan Sacks, I don’t know if you ever met him. He’s the one one of the guests, the few guests that I never got to have on my podcast. But Jonathan Sacks was a chief rabbi of the United Kingdom of the Commonwealth. And he has this kind of brilliant take. He wrote a book called The Grand Partnership about the reconciliation and the comity between religion and science. And one of the things he would speculate on was, you know, why is it that scientists are the least religious? You know, I actually happen to think that scientists are incredibly religious. Yes, we should talk more about that because I’d like to know why you think that.