https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MM2RatHQvSQ
Okay, so let me run something by you. It’s a vision that I’ve been developing or that’s been developing within me about how we come to complex knowledge. So, and it’s a vision of hierarchical mapping, and I think it probably maps on the movement from the right hemisphere to the left. So you tell me what you think about this, alright? So the first strata, imagine a tree, alright? I imagine the tree with the trunk of fire, and I imagine the tree emerging from the head of God. That was part of this vision, by the way. We’ll leave that in the background for the time being. Okay, so up the trunk, there’s a disk, and that disk is the realm of patterns in the world, right? And so what we perceive are patterns in the world, and we perceive functional patterns as obstacles or tools. It’s something like that. But the patterns are in the world. So that’s the logos of the cosmos, you might say. Alright, and then the second tier is the behavioral mapping of that. So, of course, if we’re walking across hills and dales, the path of our navigation maps the trajectory of the landscape. And as we interact with each other, we modify our behavior to take the reality of other people into account. And as we maneuver together in groups, we adapt ourselves to the reality of the environment that we’re traversing. And so the behavioral realm contains a compressed representation of the, let’s say, the underlying patterns of material reality. Alright, so that’s both adaptation and representation, because we can act out things we understand. And that would be equivalent to procedural memory in the memory literature, like the knowledge of how to ride a bike, for example, or how to ski. I’ll come back to that. Okay, okay. Next strata is imagination. See, one of the things I was trying to crack is how dreams can contain more information than the dreamer understands. Like a book of fiction can be susceptible to analysis because the work of fiction contains more information even than the fiction author intended. It’s partly because it contains representations of behavior. Okay, so we establish an imaginative realm and it captures some of the contours of the environment, but also some of the contours of the behavioral world. And so in our dreams, we have images of action and those images of action represent social mores and the world. But then there’s a further level of abstraction. That would be the linguistic level. And what the linguistic level seems to me to do is to compress the imaginative level, which is compressed the behavioral level, which is in some ways compressed the material level. And I’m wondering if that move from novelty to routinization parallels that, right? So we first grip things in this sort of Piagetian sense behaviorally. Then we can imagine that, right? So we’ve got, I mean, in dramatic using images per se. And then we further compress that. That also helps us understand what we mean when we say understand. Because if you can take a word and you can unfold it to an image and then you can decompress that to an alteration in behavior, which is, I think, what you do if a word has significance, then you’ve united all those levels of analysis. But there’s also a concordance there that I think is indicative of something like the validity of an idea. So, OK, so that’s a lot of information. I understand that. But I’m. Yeah, I mean, my initial reaction is it’s over schematic. Because I think what’s really happening is that experience is taken in at a bodily level and and is immediately grasped by the right hemisphere, which is better in touch with the unconscious than the left. But then I think, as you say, we sort of we stand back from reality in order to create pattern to see the way in which things relate. But I think this is more or less a function of the frontal lobes of both hemispheres, that they enable us to stand back enough to get, as it were, the bird’s eye view of the landscape. But the abstraction, I’d like to separate that out, because I think that’s what the left hemisphere really specializes in, is abstracting. And when you abstract, you are left really with something like a skeleton. You’re left with a diagram, a theory, a map that doesn’t have all the embodied knowledge. But the thing is that we imagine, or a lot of people imagine, they have this image in their mind, the unconscious is a tank somewhere down there underneath. But we’re living in this conscious realm. And occasionally things pop up and so on. But actually, the bit of our cognitive function of which we are aware is less than half a percent. And it’s been estimated at ninety nine point four four percent of cognition is we’re unaware of. Of course, the specificity of that is only amusing to me. But then it drives home the point that most of everything we know is extraordinarily fertile in a way that our abstracted thinking can’t be. Because it’s always got to simplify. It’s always got to state this in preference to that. Whereas in the unconscious realm, nothing has to be sacrificed in that way, because things are drawn together. And I believe our intuitions are much richer than reasoning on the basis of them. So we need to reason on the basis of them. We need to validate them or not, perfectly correct. But we shouldn’t too quickly collapse our intuitions, because our intuitions are able to hold a number of strands that to our expressive intellect seem to be contrary to one another. But they’re not. They fulfill one another, importantly. So I believe that the whole onslaught on intuition, which we now find with high paid psychologists going around businesses telling people not to trust their intuitions, is a scam. And it’s a very delusional one. It’s encouraging people to disattend to something incredibly important. Now, of course, the intuition can be wrong, but so can just a line of reasoning lead you to the wrong place. Whether you’re feeling stressed or anxious or simply seeking a moment of peace and tranquility, the Halo app has something for you. Halo offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers that are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to God. With Halo, you can embark on a journey of exploration, diving into different themes and types of prayer and meditation. From gratitude to forgiveness, each session offers a unique experience, sparking your curiosity and deepening your spiritual understanding. Choose different lengths of meditation to fit your schedule, whether you have a few minutes or an hour. This flexibility puts you in control of your own spiritual journey. 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Beyond… I mean, the purpose of having a theory is so that you can use a simple set of principles to generate a variety of explanations, right? And so there’s obvious utility in that if the principles are correct. But there’s very little difference between that and the delusion if the first principles are incorrect. Absolutely. Right. And so that’s really at the basis of a condition like paranoid schizophrenic. Because they’ll have a set of principles and they can endlessly spin off explanatory theories, and they’re credible, but they’re wrong. They’re wrong. Yeah, they’re seriously wrong. Which illuminates perfectly the… You did my work for me there in unpacking how reason can lead you to the wrong place. Because as Chesterton said, a madman is not somebody who’s lost his reason. He’s lost everything but his reason. So he hears a voice and thinks… That’s especially true for a condition like paranoid schizophrenia. It is, it is, absolutely. And Eugene Mankowski, the Franco-Polish psychiatrist and philosopher, wrote about this very, very beautifully, about schizophrenia. And effectively illuminating the difference between the left hemisphere and the right. Because I see schizophrenia as a condition in which the left hemisphere is in overdrive and the right in an attempt, if you like, to compensate for a hypo-functioning right hemisphere. you