https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AVZEWYu2uQI
let me walk through something and you tell me what you think about this. So I’ve been conceptualizing thought as secularized prayer. And the reason I’m doing that, I suppose to some degree, is anthropological, because I think that prayer preceded thought developmentally. I think that’s what the historical evidence would suggest. We haven’t been thinking rationally for very long. It’s perhaps several thousand years. We’ve been thinking religiously for much longer than that. And I’m not trying to establish a qualitative primacy here. I’m trying to count for the facts. So I’m going to outline what I think we do when we think, and I’d like you to tell me what you think about the outline. Okay. So, okay. Well, so the first thing I would say is that thoughts orient us in a manner that’s akin to our perceptions and our emotions. So they’re of the same enterprise. We use thoughts to move us towards our goals and then to transform our goals. It’s the abstract. Okay, okay, good. And then I would say that thoughts make themselves manifest in relationship to our aim, just like our perceptions do. And so our thoughts are defined, at least in part, by our aim. So this is what I think I do when I think. So the first thing I do when I think is admit that I don’t know something. So I come to the process in humility and I admit I have a problem. It’s like, here’s something I don’t understand. It could be something I’m curious about. It could be something that’s bothering me, but I have a problem. And I also admit that I have the problem and I presume that there’s an answer. And I presume that if I get the answer, that would be good. And then I would say I do something that you could describe. I allow myself to receive a thought. It’s something like that. Now I could say I think or I could say I think something up, but I don’t really like that formulation because I don’t think it’s a good description of actually what happens. What happens is that I posit a problem and answers appear to me. That’s good. I’m happy with that. It reminds me of Plato in the Theotetus where he says, Knowledge is like the birds in a giant aviary. And you’ve got all these birds. The trick is, can you get them to come when you call? And so you’ve got all this knowledge that you’ve acquired. And the hard part is getting it to come when it’s needed. And how often do we smite our forehead and say, oh, I knew that all along. Why didn’t I think of it? That’s what we find that there was something we knew that didn’t get used by us at the appropriate moment. And the best way to make the new thoughts occur to you is to be in a discussion like we’re in right now. It’s to get another mind to help you. And we stimulate each other’s minds and dredge up new corners of the other person’s minds, which may have interesting ways of putting things that we hadn’t quite thought of before. Then, oh, that’s a good way of putting it. Yeah, I get that. That’s Descartes’ big error was in being solitary, trusting to his own mind and trying to get his clear and distinct ideas ever clearer and more distinct. And the only way he could trust them, he thought, is if he posited a benevolent, all-knowing God. We don’t need that. What we need is each other. So, okay, so let me riff on that for a minute. So, there’s a gospel insistence that where two or more are gathered in the name of the Logos, that spirit makes itself manifest. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And so, imagine that what we’re trying to do in this conversation, and what we hopefully are doing to some degree, is to stumble forward somewhat less blindly toward the truth. Okay, so that’s dependent on our aim. And if our aim is at the truth, then the spirit that makes that journey possible, that’s how the religious, that would be the religious formulation. The spirit that makes that journey possible will make itself manifest in the space defined by our interaction. It would seem to me that would be a good definition of science, too. I would agree with that, but I… We can leave the religion right out of it and say it is the organization of science where trust is assumed but tested, where people of different opinions come together and sort things out constructively, and that’s the best test of all of truth. You said, for example, that they come together in trust. Yes. So, I would say that there’s a precondition for the scientific inquiry to occur even at the level of dialogue. Yes. And the precondition is that we can trust. What are we trusting, do you think? Are we trusting… The good… In that situation, what is it that allows for trust? It’s the goodwill that we normally assume in a civilized world. When you and I walk down the street, we assume that the people that we see all around us, most of whom are total strangers, we assume that they don’t mean us any harm. Okay. I like the way Paul Seabright has put this in his book, The Company of Strangers. If you put a whole lot of unrelated chimpanzees in a large room together, they would be terrified. They would be screaming and they would be unable to sit there calmly. And I sometimes point this out when I’m in a large auditorium and there’s hundreds of people, none of them related. I said, is anybody here scared to death? No, no, no, we’re not. We trust each other. That human trust is the key to civilization and to science. And it’s under attack right now with artificial intelligence and misrepresentation. And the technologies of misrepresentation, which are eroding trust in a very serious way. Okay, so I used the same example, by the way, when I’m talking to large audiences and the chimpanzee example as well. And so you said that the trust that makes even a scientific conversation possible is the trust in mutual goodwill. Right. Okay, so all right. So I want to relate that idea of goodwill back to something that we talked about earlier. So I think that if the battle between emotional and motivational systems occurs optimally, it produces a unity of spirit that makes that trust possible. That’s what you do when you socialize a child. Like children are really socialized between the age of two and four, right? They’re pretty egocentric and temporally bounded at the age of two. They kind of want whatever their motivational system wants right now and to hell with the consequences. That’s the definition of a two-year-old. And there’s some wonderful things about that. And then as they mature and as their cortex matures, those systems integrate. And if that integration takes place, then you have the presence of an overarching structure that enables that trust to be made manifest. A child will learn to take turns, for example.