https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fsIEaykViO0
The degree to which the world of what matters is the most real is indeterminate because it depends on how you define reality. If you define reality as that which exists in the objective world, then the world of what matters is not fundamental. But it’s my observation that we act as if the world of what matters is more real than the world of matter. And I think in some sense the most compelling evidence for that, even to a skeptic, and it’s a pessimistic form of evidence, but it suffices sometimes pessimistic evidence is the most potent, the reality of pain is undeniable. And it’s not amenable to rational argumentation. It announces its existence. And for a long time, I think I thought in some real sense that there was no more fundamental reality than pain. And there’s an ethical dimension to that too, because if you accept the reality of pain, there seems to come with it an impetus to eliminate unnecessary pain. And to some degree, we can understand that as the basis of the moral impulse, and maybe to eliminate the unnecessary pain of the innocent, like the unnecessary pain of children, for example. And so, well, we accept the existence of pain as something so real that we will almost instantaneously act on it. And I would say that’s especially the case, in the case, say, of infants. And so, it isn’t obvious what’s real, because it depends in some sense on how you define the term. But my sense is that what people believe is most accurately reflected, not in what they say or in the propositions about the world they lay out, but in how they act. And so, and that’s also something subject to debate, but it’s not a shallow argument to say that your belief is most deeply reflected in your action. In fact, I think in some sense, it’s the deepest of arguments. And you know perfectly well that you can say one thing and do another, and you also know that you regard people who do that as hypocrites, and you tend to regard what they do as a more profound pointer to what they believe than what they say. And so, you’ll call them on that, too. And so, that means that there are some meanings that we regard as inviolably real. Now, the reason I concentrated on pain is because it’s pretty easy to destroy joy. You can do that with a rational critique, and we’re quite good at that. You can destroy faith, and you can destroy hope, and you can destroy enthusiasm, and you can often do that even with a casual word. But pain is much more resistant to that sort of rational dismissal. I thought over the years, thinking as much as I could about unjust pain, let’s say, as a fundamental reality, wondering if there is anything more real than that, and then I would say, well, yes, there is. That which dispels pain is more real than pain. And that’s because to dispel something, you have to be more powerful than that thing in some sense. And then you can ask yourself, at all sorts of different levels of analysis, what’s capable of dispelling pain? Or at least, let’s say, rendering pain acceptable, which is not perhaps as deep a solution or as desirable a solution, but is also not nothing. And I would say that many of the things we regard as cardinal virtues are virtues, in fact, because if you have them on your side, you can, in fact, contend with and perhaps dispel or triumph over or transcend the inevitable pain and suffering of existence. And I think one of the fundamental purposes of education is to provide people with the peers and the… And the allies, to use a word that’s been contaminated so terribly, that enable them to stand up nobly in the face of tragedy and still move forward with what is good in mind. And that’s a very different purpose than inculcating in people a thoroughly detailed description of the patterns of the objective world. And I’m not saying for a moment that there’s nothing useful about the latter, but the former is… People starve and thirst in desperation without the former. And so… And those are realities. Now, as I said, if you start out with the axiomatic assumption that only what is objective is real, well, then that argument falls flat, but I think there’s no reason whatsoever not to raise the question of what it is that you’re using to base your axiomatic definition of reality upon. And I think that noting what people do is a very good pointer to the real. So here’s another way of thinking about the logos. For the world to be intelligible, it must consist of patterned regularities. And that might be the great discovery of the Greeks, in some sense, that there are patterned regularities that are superordinate to immediate perception, that are in some sense more real. So number would reflect that, for example. Are numbers more or less real than the things they represent? And you can make an argument both ways, because again, it depends on your definition of real, but it’s a very difficult argument to make that they’re less real. And partly that’s because if you’re a master of number, there’s almost nothing that’s beyond your grasp. So if the depth of your wisdom is reflected in the utility of your tools, then almost nothing makes you more powerful than to be a master of numbers. And that seems to point to an ability to grip some element of a reality that’s more fundamental, that is outside of immediate perception. And so one element of the idea of the logos is that there’s an order to the world that’s superordinate to the apparent order that’s more fundamentally real. And that you can discover that order in contact with the world. And that’s the microcosmic world, in some sense, rather than the psychological world. And so that seems useful. And I would say these patterned regularities, they’re of two types. There’s patterned regularities of being, and an object is a patterned regularity of being. One of the things I came to understand as I studied the science of perception is that we don’t see objects. We see patterns, and we infer objects. And so the pattern recognition is more fundamental than the object recognition. It’s also the case, by the way, that we don’t just see patterns and infer objects. We see useful patterns and infer objects. And I don’t mean as a second order inference, I mean as a direct perception. And so it’s quite obvious, sophisticated psychologists of perception have noted that, in some real sense, the perception of the meaning of a phenomenon precedes the perception of the phenomenon. And I really mean directly. There’s also, there’s, much of what you see, for example, is very much associated with what you can grip. Because even your vision is tightly associated with the act of gripping, because what you need to see is what will give you a grip on the world. And you might say you see the thing and then determine how to grip it, but that’s not how it works. Your retina, for example, which represents patterns in the world, propagates those patterns through your nervous system and manifests itself in such things as preparation for grip. And that’s outside of conscious visual perception. And so you cannot make the case that what you do when you perceive is pull in objective sense data and then sort the world from that. The neurology, the neurological investigations have rendered that presumption invalid. Not only that, there’s another problem. Well, let’s refer to, we’ll do this in two parts. For the world to be intelligible, it must consist of patterned regularities and their regularities of being and becoming. Another issue is when you encounter the world, do you see what’s there? And the answer to that is, well, yes, but you also perceive what could be. And so I would say that what you perceive is an amalgam of the patterned regularities of both being and becoming. And you can think about this and make it intelligible. If you think about what happens when you wake up in the morning, you might ask yourself, well, what do you perceive when you wake up in the morning? And you open your eyes and you might say, well, I perceive my bedroom. And I suppose in some very trivial sense, that’s true. Although generally your bedroom is so familiar that you don’t need to perceive it. You’ve already automatized that perception and it has almost zero functional utility. I suppose you have to perceive it well enough to wend your way through it when you step out of bed. But that isn’t really what you perceive, not my experience. And I believe this is a very common experience, is that what you perceive when consciousness dawns in the morning is the horizon of possibility that’s associated with the world in front of you. And so what you really see, as far as I can tell, is something directly akin to the chaos that God encounters as the Word, the Logos, at the beginning of time. Which is, there’s pattern regularity of being, that’s a solid object because it propagates itself across time in this three-dimensional form. But then there’s a cloud of possibility around each object, which is what additional realities it can manifest depending on how you act in relationship to it. And that’s not only true of simple objects, because simple objects can be many things. So a heavy drinking mug can also be a weapon, for example, which begs the question of what is that thing? It’s a drinking glass and a weapon. And broken, it’s a knife. And many, many objects, if not all, have quite a wide cloud of possibility around them. And then the interactions between objects have a tremendously wide distribution of possibility. And that’s the becoming that’s implicit in the being. And I think that’s actually what you confront when you wake up in the morning. Because generally what happens is that as consciousness dawns, and consciousness is an agent that contends with being and its potential transformations, you see arrayed in front of you a set of indeterminate possibilities which you could bring into being as a consequence of your imposition of vision with some degree of effort and energy. And what you do in some real sense is prioritize and rank order the importance of the possibilities that you contend with, maybe even before you get out of bed. And I would say, in some real sense, if you’re not doing that, you’re actually not living up to your possibility.