https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UnpB49iP5uU
So let’s start with postmodernism The first thing to understand about the postmodernists are that they are by no means unintelligent Quite the contrary Jacques Derrida for example and Michelle Foucault for that matter Two famous French public intellectuals who are both at or near the head of what you might describe as the postmodern intellectual revolution are extraordinarily Intellectually capable That doesn’t mean they’re correct by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly means that they’re more than able to put together a An argument that’s difficult to disentangle and so we’ll start with it What I think is the most central power the most powerful central claim of postmodernism a claim Which I think is actually correct and which also has bedeviled many other fields including surprisingly enough artificial intelligence the claim is something like There is an infinite number of ways to interpret any even finite set of phenomena and and And that actually happens to be true It’s it’s it’s part of the reason why it’s been so difficult for human beings to develop artificial intelligence and for them to develop Machines that could operate in real-world environments because it turns out that the world is so complex that perceiving it Appears virtually impossible technically speaking we heard a little bit earlier the previous talk about embodied cognition and one of the ways psychologists are trying to address the issue of the impossibility of perception is to note that Perception isn’t possible without situating the mind in a body that has a certain set of constraints We also devote a tremendous amount of our neurological landscape to Sensory processing so that when we look at the world it can manifest itself in the self-evident way that it appears to but that doesn’t Mean that it’s a simple problem. It’s a very complicated problem and the postmodernists were technically correct There’s there’s a there’s a near infinite number of ways to to perceive and interpret a finite number of phenomena now You see the thing that’s interesting about that claim Apart from the fact that it happens to be technically true Is that you can use it to mount an assault on any interpretation of anything whatsoever? Because there is a tremendous very variability in the number of interpretations that you could bring to bear on a situation then you can instantly jump to the conclusion or Expound the proposition that none of those interpretations should be privileged among above all above any others Now that’s actually wrong and This is why postmodernism is correct in its central assumption But incorrect in its secondary assumption now the reason it’s wrong is because although there is a very large number of potential Interpretations of the world that does not mean that there is an equally large number of viable interpretations of the world Now you might say well what constitutes constraints on the viability of an interpretation and I would say well There’s a number of them, and I think you have to understand this in the context of living creatures Viewing and interpreting the world and also within a broader evolutionary context the way that evolution solves the problem of the infinite number of Potential interpretations is by killing every single thing that interprets things badly enough to die Right and so I mean this this is actually one of the most powerful arguments for the necessity of the evolutionary For the necessity of the accuracy of the evolutionary theory It’s it’s that you know it’s taken three and a half billion years of evolution to produce creatures of our sort Who can interpret the world which is impossible to interpret well enough to live for approximately? 80 years and to have some reasonable chance of propagating during that period of time three and a half billion years And that’s the best we’ve been able to do It’s a very complicated problem and evolution solves that problem by producing a tremendous number of variants and then killing almost all of them And so death is the solution to the problem of interpretation, and it’s a terrible solution But the point I’m trying to make there is that? Interpretations are constrained by such things primary things that happen to be relevant to living beings like suffering and death So those are the first sets of constraints your Interpretations of the world should shield you to the degree possible from excess suffering and death It doesn’t seem to be too debatable a proposition unless you’re aimed in the suicidal direction And so so we can start by merely pointing that out We also might point out that such things as the necessity for cooperating and competing with others also Constraints the interpretations that you’re allowed in the world especially given that not only do you have to cooperate and compete with people? One time but that you have to cooperate and compete with often the same people many times in many different Contexts and so that not only do you have to interpret the world so that you can cooperate and compete with those people you have? To do it in a manner that can be iterated and repeated and that constitutes also an extraordinary serious constraint So you don’t want to suffer too much And you don’t want to die and you want to be able to cooperate with people and you want to be able to compete with Them and you want to be able to do that over long periods of time and then maybe you also want to do it with An aim in mind because generally we have aims in mind and so there are things that we like to have more than other things And so we aim at those and then we have to constrain our interpretation so that when we enact them in the world the probability That what we’re aiming at is going to happen will improve and all of those constraints operates Operate simultaneously and what that implies and I think Jean Piaget the developmental psychologist Maybe went farther along this line of thinking than anyone else I know about anyways It’s sort of an elaboration of Kant’s fundamental X ethical maxim which was something like Act as if the thing that you’re doing will be done by everyone and but the Piagetian sense was more like act as if the Thing that you’ll be doing needs to be repeated endlessly in a manner that moves up instead of down It’s something like that But the point is is that there’s there’s tremendous constraints on the manner in which we can interpret the world from any realistic Perspective so the criticism that there are an infinite number of interpretations falls apart on closer examination So that’s that that’s the first place that the postmodernists are seriously wrong they radically underestimated the intrinsic constraints on on on interpretation You