https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BlTlvlQcLZI
The Lord God said it is not good that man should be alone I will make a help mead for him and out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fall of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof And Adam gave names to all the cattle in the fall of cattle means animals basically and to the fall of the air and Every beast of the field but for Adam there was not found a help mead for him. Okay. Well a couple of things there Speculations number one. It’s like why does God care what Adam calls the animals and The answer to that seems to be that it’s associated again with the magic of speech Right so that we know according to the story that human beings were already made in the image of God and that God used language in order to call order forth from chaos and that Human beings were made in that image and so there’s an echo of that here even though it’s from an independent tradition the echo is the thing isn’t quite real till you name it and That’s quite and that that’s an interesting thing and we don’t exactly know how far that extends. It’s certainly the case that Like seem things often exist in a strange Potential form interconnected form where everything’s confusing like a mass of confusion before you put your finger on it name it What’s going on here? You name it? It’s like it Carves it out from all that underlying chaos and makes it into a grippable entity that you can then contend with And you might say well it was real before you named it. It’s like well Yes, it was real before you named it the same way things are there when there’s no one there to perceive them and It isn’t obvious how things are there when you’re not there to perceive them I’ll tell you something bloody weird about perception you can look this up and John Wheeler John Wheeler is a physicist so here’s a really cool thing let’s say you go outside at night and you look up and you see a star and Like so a photon from that star enters your eye And maybe that photon has been cruising along for like 30 million years Do you know that that photon would not have been emitted from that star at that time if your eye wasn’t there at that time to receive it You think well how in the hell can that be because it happened 20 million years ago? It’s like well I don’t know how it can be to tell you the truth But I know that John Wheeler has done a very good job of detailing out why that’s true and necessarily true And so Wheeler is also the physicist who developed the notion of it from bit and he believes that the world is best construed as a The potential of the world is best construed as a place of information It’s something like latent information and that what consciousness does is transform the latent Information into something like concrete reality He doesn’t mean that metaphorically and one of the cases that he makes in that regard is this story that I just told you is That the photon couldn’t have leapt from where it was unless it had a place to go now it’s it’s Complicated and confusing because from the perspective of a beam of light from a photon there is no time and there’s no distance from one Point to another when of course that’s completely impossible to understand too But from the perspective of a photon the universe is completely flat perpendicular to the direction that the photon is traveling So it’s there and here at the same time for us. It’s not it’s like 20 million years ago But for the photon it’s it’s all here and now so Anyways the reason I’m telling you all that is because the relationship between consciousness and reality is by no means straightforward It is seriously not straightforward and physicists physicists debate What the relationship is between consciousness and reality and they debate about? What the sort of phenomena that I just described mean and I’m not really qualified to enter into that debate because I’m not a physicist But I do know and I’ve read it for a bit of Wheeler is about as much of it as I can understand And I do at least know that that’s what he claimed and I also know that that claim is is not That’s a claim that’s taken seriously among physicists of the caliber of the physicists who can understand Wheeler So that’s pretty interesting so anyways there is emphasis again on this importance of naming in order to make things real you know and Sometimes people won’t name things just so they don’t become real So you know if you’re if you have a relationship which undoubtedly you do and it has problems which undoubtedly it does you bloody Well know that lots of times There’s something under the carpet that no one wants to name and everybody’s thinking well as long as we don’t name it It’s not really there and in some sense it really isn’t there because you can act as if it’s not there and get away with It at least for short periods of time as soon as you name that thing It’s like you give it form and it’s there and no one can ignore it And that’s annoying because then you have to deal with it or or face the consequences but the reason I’m telling you that is because we have a An intuition even that we can have things not exist by not naming them you name it And it comes forward with staggering clarity And it’s not as if naming it is the only thing that gives it reality But it is something like it it sharpens it and brings it into focus and gives it borders and barriers borders and boundaries and so Anyways, God’s interested enough in what Adam has to say that he has him name all the animals and that sort of makes them Into animals now There’s more to the linguistic story than that so social psychologists Roger Brown was one of them studied this really interesting phenomena Which is associated with? Relationship between perception and action you know how a kid will call a particular animal a cat Well the word cat is very short like the word dog and it turns out that you know you could think that we could perceive Cats as multi-cellular organisms like we could see the cells we could see the Molecules we could see the atoms we could see or we could see the ecosystem that the cat is part of but we don’t Or maybe the the broader mammalian classification that it’s part of we could perceive that as the unit of perception but we don’t we perceive things at the level of cat and You can tell the perceptual level that people naturally perceive that which doesn’t seem to be Socioculturally determined to any great degree by the way because the words are often short and easily remembered and early learned and so There’s this level of analysis Out of all the possible levels of analysis that the world does exist at we Perceive it at a certain level of analysis and that level of analysis seems to have something to do with the world’s Functional utility for us at that level and the perception at that level and the naming at that level Gives things a reality at that level you know because the thing about things is that they’re not easily separable from other things they tangle together in all sorts of strange ways and Yet when we cast our eye and and and use our language to orient ourselves in the world we cut things up into discrete Discriminable objects that we can then utilize and there’s something about that that makes them real in a way that they’re interconnected Interconnected potential the interconnected potential that they were before that It’s not it’s not real in the same way at least. I think it’s even less real I think that’s a right way of thinking about it even though. It’s not completely unreal, but it’s an echo Adams a little God at that point a little God the father and God’s already done the groundwork But Adam has to come along and says say well. That’s a cat It’s like poof whatever that is is now a cat and that’s a dog and that’s a sheep And you know it gives them it gives them something like pragmatic form