https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XBiSd5vuvzg
One of the things that Sam Harris, one of the criticisms that Sam Harris and the atheists in general have levied at thinkers like myself and thinkers, let’s say like Carl Jung, this is also a postmodern critique, is that the interpretation of a given narrative is arbitrary, that you can read into a narrative anything you want, and that there’s no, you might say, intrinsic meaning in the text. Now, there’s actually, that’s actually wrong, and we actually know why now, and we can actually demonstrate that it’s wrong, and I have no idea what the ultimate significance of that will be, but let me tell you why, because this is really quite fascinating. So, we know that some words are more similar than others, and then you might say, well, what makes words or concepts similar? And the answer would be something like substitutability, or you could think about it as, so substitutability with regard to a purpose, it’s a very critical and strange definition of similarity, but also proximity in the space of meaning. And then you might say, well, what does it mean for things to be proximal in the meaning space, and it means likely to co-occur? Now, this student I’m referring to, his name is Victor Swift, by the way, he’s been able to show, and this is essentially mathematically, a conceptual overlap between ten concepts and the concept of God. So, imagine this, Bishop Barron, imagine this, that you, that every concept has a centre, okay, so the concept of God, the centre of the concept of God would be God. But then imagine that there’s a cloud of immediate associations around that concept, and that, those associations are the concepts that are statistically most likely to co-occur with that concept. Okay, so this is something approximating a mathematical fact, has nothing to do with subjective opinion. So then you could imagine, and we’re trying to map this, that you have God in the centre, and then close to that would be the true, the beautiful, and the good. And then there’d be another cloud of associations around that, that would be second order associations. Now, the way a large language model works is that it actually learns those associations at multiple levels of comparison simultaneously. So it actually maps out what you might describe as the semantic space, or the space of meaning. Now, so this would also, this would also imply, this is where it gets so cool. So imagine if we took a cloud of concepts that people universally recognised as good. So you could imagine that you and me and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins would have a fair amount of agreement on what those goods were. You know, individual, the dignity of the individual, the idea of the good, the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of upwards driving. Okay, now imagine that that makes a conceptual cloud. There’s going to be a centre of that cloud that constitutes the reason for the similarity of the ideas. And it looks to me like, semantically speaking, so in terms of our verbal content, this might also be true with regards to the stories we tell, that the central concept around which all goods rotate is indistinguishable from the semantic representation of God. And it also looks like we can now map that. So I think we can dispense entirely with the criticism that the interpretation of, say, biblical narratives has to be something arbitrary. And we can also make the case, which Carl Jung made to begin with, is that in any system of value that’s coherent, there’s going to be a central factor that accounts for its coherence. And it’s certainly the case, it’s highly probable that that’s indistinguishable from the concept of God. That’s how it looks. And so that’s so cool, because we’re starting to be able to use this technology to dispense with opinion. So, you know, Jung said, called or uncalled, God is present. Right, God is there. Right, right. And I don’t remember who he derived that from, but that was what he had carved on his castle at Bollingen. But that’s the same idea, right, that implicit in a semantic landscape is the central concept of the highest ideal. That’s kind of like the sum of bonhams. So I’m just wondering, well, what you might be thinking about in relationship to that possibility. Yeah, there’s so much there. There’s questions of hermeneutics and questions of metaphysics and questions of psychology and that. You know, I’m against the postmoderns who want to unravel the self, first of all. There’s no really coherent self that does this judging and analyzing. There’s also, they want to unravel metaphysics. And what you’re arguing there in a more sort of semantic way is that there is a coherence to the self. There is a coherence to the metaphysical structure of the real. So to use an example of God, yes, we would say that God is not a being, but being itself. So the famous answer given to Moses, right? Ego sum qui sum, I am who I am. Moses is asking, what kind of being are you? He’s trying to put God in categorical terms. And the answer there is so important because that makes all the difference when it comes to understanding religious language. If we follow Moses and his question, we will inevitably end up in atheism. Because if you think God is a categorical object in the world, eventually you’ll say, well, I don’t see this object and there’s no evidence for it. And I can explain the world without it. So that’s why the answer of God in Exodus is so powerful because he’s saying dumb question, wrong question. I’m not a thing in the world that you can name. I am who I am, which means I’m the Prius. That’s Augustine’s language. I’m prior to thought and to language. I’m prior to being. I’m that upon which the categorical realm depends. Right. So from that, if you get God is, as Aquinas says, the act of to be itself. So Aquinas says God is not en summum, highest being, but ipsum esse, right? To be itself. Right, the principle of being. Right. So if you say that, well, then right away you’ve got the central organizing principle of all reality. And then everything else has to cluster around, which is why we speak about God as being the creator of all things. But also to your semantic point about the good and the beautiful and so on the true, we call those the transcendental properties of being. Wherever you find being, you find those things. Therefore, they are closely related to the central idea of God, and which is precisely why in the spiritual order we get at God through those avenues, through the true and the good and the beautiful. There’s our friend James Joyce. When you see the beautiful girl off the beach and you take in her beauty, what that leads you to, as Stephen Daedalus says, is, oh, heavenly God. So that’s the platonic path that Joyce, you know, so that’s the clustering of those ideas tightly around God. And then to your point about stories, I think that’s really important because I don’t agree with the postmodern kind of unraveling of narrative. And it’s simply a matter of subjective opinion. It’s just the reader response. See, what tells against that, as you well know, is this ancient tradition of a coherent reading of these texts. I mean, why is it that people over now millennia have read these texts and found very deep and consistent ideas? It’s because they have a semantic structure, which is dependent upon a metaphysical structure, which gives rise to a spiritual transformation. They’re classic texts for that reason. And we shouldn’t simply read them as, oh, they’re just this, you know, coming together of words and I can read any way I want to. Well, no, the whole of human interpretive history tells against that. So I think we do have to battle the postmodern, ultimately nihilism metaphysically and the sort of indifference at the level of interpretation. No, no, these are classic texts that have spoken for very good reason. I think I actually think that that battle is over because I think the large language models are going to demolish their pretensions. So here. So imagine this. Here’s a way of two things. So why did God disappear, die, let’s say, and the psychoanalysts believe that God sunk into the unconscious. That was Jung’s proposition that if God dies formally, all that happens is that the the prime factor becomes unconscious. So imagine this. Yeah.