https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Gb1nqCOOr4c
And you tell me if you think this is wrong. Dawkins implicitly reduces sex to lust. Then he reduces reproduction to sex. And the problem with that is that reproduction is not exhausted by lust or sex. Quite the contrary, especially in human beings, because not only do we have to chase women, let’s say, but then when we have children, we have to invest in them for like 18 years before they’re good for continual reproduction. And we have to interact with them in a manner that’s predicated on an ethos that improves the probability of their reproductive fitness. And so reproduction, see, this is something that the Darwinists, the casual Darwinists do very incautiously, as far as I’m concerned, because they identify the drive to reproduction with sex. And that’s a big mistake, because sex might ensure your reproduction proximally for one generation, but the pattern of behavior that you establish and instantiate in your offspring, which would be an ethos, might ensure your reproduction multigenerationally, you see. And that appears to be what’s being played out in this story of Abraham is that the unconscious mind, let’s say, trying to map the fitness landscape is attempting to determine what pattern of behavior is most appropriate if the goal is maximal reproductive fitness calculated across multiple generations, or maybe across infinitely iterating generations. And so that points to something again, like you said earlier, you called it a general fitness, what was it? I gotta get it here, big fitness payoff, right? And that could be the ethos to which all these subsidiary ethoses are integrated. See, okay, okay. So, well, so I’m wondering what you think about that is that, first of all, what you think about the proposition that evolutionary biologists, Dawkins is a good case in mind, have erred when they’ve too closely identified reproduction like with short term sex, it’s like, that isn’t a guarantee of reproduction, we wouldn’t invest in our children if that was the case, we would just leave them. The sex is done, we’ve reproduced, you need an ethos to guarantee reproductive fitness across time. Well, there’s several levels here. First, Dawkins, of course, understands that most sex is a sex, most reproduction is asexual, right? So sexual reproduction is a relatively recent thing. Most reproduction has been asexual. So Dawkins is very famous for talking about the selfish gene. And it’s really, when he talks about reproduction, it’s about genes reproducing themselves, really not so much about sex is one way of having that happen, but you know, bacteria do without sex. And so the emphasis on sex was, I would say, Dawkins, of course, understands that sex isn’t fundamental. Now, when it comes to human motivations and mammal motivations, perhaps, in that specific context, you might then be talking about it. But even there, when you start talking about sexual reproduction, there are many, many strategies that organisms use. So for example, some spiders will have just hundreds of babies and eat some of them, they’ll eat some of them, you know, and let the others do that. Having the babies is their only job. And after that, the babies are on their own. And so there are different strategies. So this is where Dawkins is quite famous, justifiably, for his work on the selfish gene idea. That is, there are different strategies. But the only thing that matters in this framework is what is the probability that particular genes, you know, spread through the population in later generations. Sex came along apparently to deal with… Okay, as one of the pathways to that, right? One of the paths, that’s right. And so, but there’s another framework in thinking about all this as well. So again, I love evolutionary theory, I think in terms of models of evolution and so forth, of creatures and their behaviors. It’s an incredibly powerful theory. I’ve used it a lot. My book, Case Against Reality, talks about it in great detail. It’s a wonderful theory. But I think that from this deeper framework that science is now moving into beyond space-time, all of evolutionary theory, all of it is an artifact of projection. It’s not, in other words, if you’re looking like from a spiritual point of view for some deep principles, deep spiritual principles, evolution, I don’t think is deep enough. I think that it’s, all of it is an artifact of space-time projection. And if you’re going to be thinking, looking for deep principles about, you know, that spiritual traditions, about Abraham, and really thinking big, I think that thinking inside space-time is not big enough. You’ve got to step entirely outside of space-time. Space-time has all these artifacts. And we’re so used to being stuck in the headset. Well, there is an insistence upon that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, because God is conceptualized, what would you say, traditionally as being entirely outside of time and space. And so whatever works for human, like the human landscape and the divine landscape, they’re not the same. There’s a relationship between them, however, but they’re not the same. Okay, so now, okay, so let me ask you about that. Now, you have made the case, not least in this interview, that consciousness is primary. Now, consciousness uses these projections. So how do you reconcile the notion that consciousness is primary? And I want to make sure I’m not misreading what you’re saying, that consciousness is primary, but consciousness operates in the world with these projections. See, because this is the thing I grapple with, is that if survival itself is dependent on the utilization of a scheme of pragmatic projections, in what sense can we say that reality is something other than that? Because, see, this is something that person and William James wrestled with too. It’s like, well, why make the claim that there is a reality outside of the human concern with survival and reproduction? And if consciousness is the primary reality, and it’s using projections to orient itself so that it can survive and reproduce in the biological sense, how can you even begin to put forward a claim that there is a reality that transcends that? Like, on what grounds does it transcend it? In relationship to what? Right. So these are deep waters. And the idea that I’m playing with right now is that this consciousness is, there’s one ultimate infinite consciousness. And what is it up to? Knowing itself. But how do you know yourself? Well, there are certain theorems that say that no system can actually completely know itself. Right. So if this one infinite consciousness wants to know itself, all it can do is start looking at itself through different perspectives. So putting on different headsets. So space-time is one headset. And from that perspective, here’s a projection. So this is a projection of the one infinite consciousness. And in that perspective, it looks like evolution of a natural selection. It looks like quantum field theory and so forth. And it looks like I need to play the game this way. But this is a trivial headset. This is actually, I think, one of the cheaper headsets. Okay. That’s very interesting. Okay. So one of the things, so while writing the book that I’m writing now, I’ve been walking through all these biblical narratives. And one of the things they do, every single narrative provides a different characterization of the infinite. There’s no real replication. It’s like, well, here’s a picture of the divine, and here’s another one, and here’s another one, and here’s another one. Now there’s an insistence that runs through the text. This unites the text that those are all manifestations of the same underlying reality. But it is definitely the case that what’s happening is that these are movies, so to speak, shot from the perspective of different directors. And it does seem to me akin to something coming to know itself. There’s this ancient Jewish idea. This is a great, it’s like a Zen cone. It’s a great little mystery. It says, so here’s the proposition. So God has traditionally imbued the following characteristics, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. What does that lack? And you know, you think, well, that’s a ridiculous question because by definition that lacks nothing. But the answer is limitation. That lacks limitation. And that’s actually the classical explanation for God’s creation of man, is that the unlimited needs the limited as a viewpoint. It has something to do with the development of, as you pointed out, I believe, it has something to do with the possibility of coming to, it’s something like conscious awareness. You see this in T.S. Eliot too. I don’t remember which poem where he talks about coming back to the point of origin, which is like the return to childhood, you know, that heavenly notion that to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to become as a little child. It’s like, but there’s a transformation there so that that return to the point of origin is accompanied by an expansion of consciousness. It’s not a collapse back into childish unconsciousness. It’s the reattainment of a, what would you say? It’s the reattainment of the state of play. That’s a good way of thinking about it, that obtained when you were a child, but with conscious differentiated knowledge. So there is this tremendous narrative drive in the Western tradition towards differentiated, comprehensive understanding as a positive good. And that seems tied up with the continual drama between God and man. So, and I do think the scientific enterprise is an offshoot of that. That’s what it looks like to me historically. So, okay, so how in the world do you survive in psychology departments, given what you’re thinking about?