https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rM8JsibkrI8
So you’ll undoubtedly you’ve noticed that this is being taped so the tapes will show up on some relatively regular schedule I wouldn’t expect that precisely because I don’t want to make any promises about you know exactly how quickly that’ll be done Martin Zhang here is doing it on his own accord so it’s like you know two thumbs up for Martin as far as I’m concerned So because he’s done this for a number of my courses, and it’s a lot of work, and it’s much appreciated So anyways, that’s why all of this stuff is set up So I think I told you pretty much about what the class entails on your part You know, and if you’ve heard this lecture, I’m sure at least a reasonable number of you have heard me lecture before So you sort of know how I’m going to lecture, and that was more or less how I’m going to do it I’m hoping that you know we can make this class like deadly successful, that’s the idea And that you’ll regard it as something that, depending on your participation obviously, you’ll regard it as something that’s really valuable I’m telling you the stuff I’ve learned that I’m telling you about, it has been so useful to me that I can’t really even communicate how useful it’s been It’s been unbelievably useful And you know, partly what I’m going to explain to you if I can is why, you know, there are tenets of classical morality And there’s a variety of them, and one of them is for example, don’t lie And you know, that’s a tough one, because you might think, well you know, why not? Really, why not? I mean if you can set up a situation so that you benefit from an untruth, what stops you from doing it? You know, Dostoevsky, in one of his most famous statements, he said, if there’s no God, everything is permitted And it’s a take off on Nietzschean thinking too, and it’s a problem that he thought would be the fundamental problem of the 20th century And I think he was absolutely right, and it’s a question very much worth thinking about, it’s like, why bother with things that are moral? Why do things right? Is there even such a thing as doing things right? These are great questions You know, and hopefully, what I’m going to try to do with you guys is to show you what the consequence I’ve been thinking about those things for, you know, it’s almost 30 years I guess now And I’ve got a ways, certainly a ways that has been satisfying to me, and I want to tell you what I’ve concluded And then you can decide for yourself if you think it’s useful, and one thing I would really like encourage you to do Is like, you should be skeptical about what I’m telling you Really, like you should question it, like, I don’t mean the kind of skepticism that’s like this Because like, you know, I’m not here to prove myself to you at all, and you’re not here to prove yourself to me either So you have to listen, you have to attend, but by the same token I would say like I’m telling you things that I have tried to hammer to death I’ve tried to see if they were wrong, you know, because that’s how you’re supposed to test ideas You throw out an idea and you hammer the hell out of it, see if you can see if it’s wrong Not whether it’s right, because that’s ideological thinking And the things I’m telling you are things I could not disprove They seem to stand up, and I’ve tried multiple tests, you know, so one of them is sort of a consilience test And a consilience is a word that was defined by Edward O. Wilson, and when an explanation is consilient What that means is that it’s coherent across multiple levels of analysis You know, and so I’ve tried to test the ideas that I’m describing to you I’ve tried to determine whether they’re logically coherent and appropriate at the level of general psychology and clinical psychology And neuroscience, and narrative theory, and religious thinking And then also to see if they’re actually applicable as practical realities in day to day life and in social life And as far as I’m concerned, they stand up, that’s been my experience And I’ve also watched people over many years now try to apply them in their own lives And all I’ve been able to see so far with my graduate students and so on is that it works So, you know, hooray for that And so we’re going to try to understand some basic issues like what the utility of truth is And that’s a really important question, it’s maybe the fundamental question Is truth useful? And if so, how and why? And like, man, we’re going to go after that, especially with regards to verbal truth Because there’s something magical about words There really is something magical about them And the way you use words determines the course of your life And maybe more than that, maybe the course of everyone’s life So I want to explain to you how that can be true and what it means So, you know, that should be relatively entertaining Hopefully, what else I can tell you is I’m going to throw out some key propositions There’s probably about seven or eight of them And what I’m hoping is that you’ll be able to use those propositions as keys That will help you unlock things that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to consciously understand And I gave you some example of that with this little story, you know Because that little story happens to be an extraordinarily deep little story And it’s, you know, it’s so old, that story Like, I think that story stems from when we were still in trees, really And that when our prime enemies were snakes Because it does appear, according to Lynn Isbell anyways, who’s an anthropologist in California That our primary predators 60 million years ago, when we were basically inhabiting trees Were predatory snakes, and that we co-evolved with them And so the human being versus snake motif is not only the oldest story we know From a consciously articulated perspective But it might be the literal story of our species as a biological entity So, you know, that, and I’m telling you that because it gives you some idea about how deep these stories can go They can go, like, to the, really to the bottom of things And if you know some of these key propositions When you see archetypal stories portrayed in front of you And that happens all the time Like, I mean, all the superhero movies that have come out later, lately There’s, you know, hordes of them, they’re tremendously expensive to make Hundreds of millions of dollars, those things It’s like, they’re all predicated on archetypal themes You know, and I think it’s of great interest to note The most expensive artifacts that human beings produce Or at least among the most expensive artifacts that we produce Are precisely movies that are computer generated to tell archetypal stories You know, and that’s also the technological process that in large part is driving computer innovation Because the most demand that’s being placed on things like computer chips is actually, you know, recreating reality, CGI reality Because it’s the most complicated thing to do So it’s like, what the hell, why are we doing that? What’s up with that? Why would you spend 300 million dollars making Iron Man? You know, there’s a profit motive there, obviously But everybody will go see it It’s like, what’s up with you people? You know, you’ll see some dingbat in a metal suit fly around in the air You know that’s not true It’s like, what are you doing at those movies? You think, well, I’m entertaining myself It’s like, yeah, yeah, right Except why is it entertaining? And why is it entertaining to all of you? And why is it entertaining to everyone? You know, there’s a reason for that So partly what we’re going to find out too is What it is about stories that attract our interest And why it is, why that is And it’s not merely entertainment It’s like the most potent form of learning that we have So, well, anyway So that’s the goal And during this as well, you know, I hope that you can articulate yourselves further And also come to some deeper understanding about the absolute essential nature Of proper language use in spoken language and in written language Because you basically think and speak and write yourself into existence And one of the things that means is You should be very, very careful with what you say Because you are literally bringing realms of reality into being through speaking And you want to make bloody sure that the realms of reality that you’re participating in bringing into being Are the ones that you would actually like yourself and those you love to inhabit So, you know, it’s a… Well, I don’t have much more to say about the course than that So what I’ll do now is see if you have any questions So, yes Right, well, yeah, you know, okay, so the question is why is the dragon portrayed as bad? It’s like, well, first of all, we might notice that cross-culturally that’s not necessarily the case, right? So the dragon in the West tends to be something to conquer And something that hoards… …urgence, strangely enough And it’s something to be conquered and the treasure to be taken But in the East, particularly among the Chinese, the dragon is something that’s positive And what I would say is, and we’ll study this when we get into the symbolism that’s associated with reptiles Fundamentally, with predatory reptiles You see that the dragon is actually a tremendously ambivalent representation Because it represents… It really represents the unknown Or even more precisely, it represents the element of the unknown that you don’t even know exists You know, because sometimes something unexpected could happen to you But you can understand it when it happens But sometimes something unexpected happens to you And it’s so unexpected that you can’t even conceptualize it I would say when the Twin Towers fell in New York, that was an event like that It’s really outside the domain of your understanding And then there’s an ambivalence about that Because you don’t know the nature of the event precisely So the predatory reptile, especially the treasure-guarding predatory reptile Stands for the potential that exists in the unknown And that potential can be positive and negative Because it’s the source of all new things But it’s also the source of that which will destroy you And so it’s a very paradoxical entity Now, one more thing So the story implies that there’s an optimal size of the dragon And I would say, well, your nervous systems are actually tuned to detect the optimal size of dragons We’ll talk about this in great detail as we go through the biology of anxiety and disgust As it turns out, which is something I’ve learned more about recently You know how you can… Sometimes if you’re engaged in a task, let’s say a cognitive task You can find it overwhelming It’s something you’re having a very difficult time understanding And maybe you even wonder if you’re up to it So you might say, well, your nervous system is indicating to you that that’s a threat And then other times you’ll be dealing, say, with a cognitive task that’s beneath your abilities And so it’s easy and you get bored So then you’ll be dealing with a cognitive task that… It’s like Goldilocks and the three bears, right? The temperature is just right And what happens is that you have to grapple with the task And it pushes you forward in your development But it also really engages you So you’re tied right into it It’s really easy to remember and understand it You make progress and it’s difficult and energy demanding But you’re completely captivated by the process That’s the right size dragon And that’s what your nervous system is telling you It’s saying, look, this amount of novel information in this domain Is precisely the amount that you can incorporate While optimally transforming the knowledge structures that you already have Without exceeding your capacity And what that does, the way your nervous system signals that to you Is you get interested in it Because you might ask yourself, why do you get interested in things? And you’re bored by some things and some things are overwhelming It’s like you don’t have any choice about that It’s not a decision you make, right? It’s something you discover as you act in the world So dragons of optimal size are engaging and they push your development But if they get too big, then they’re too much It could be that Like the thing about that particular symbol is that it describes the unknown outside of conceptualization It’s pure potential Now, here’s something to think about in relationship to that I did a little TED talk on potential Which, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, you might want to look at Because I got it right in that talk, I thought But there are different ways of thinking about what the world’s made out of And we think that it’s made out of matter That’s the basic dogma, say, of the materialist realm And I would say, look, it’s really useful to treat the world as if it’s made out of matter And look at all the things that treating it that way has allowed us to do But that doesn’t mean it’s the final statement about the nature of reality And whatever matter is is pretty damn strange when you get to the bottom of it We don’t understand it at all And we don’t understand its relationship to consciousness But putting that aside, we also act as if things other than matter are real So, for example, we act as if potential is real And that’s a very strange thing, you know Because potential by its very nature is not really defined Because otherwise it would be potential, right? It would be actuality But, you know, all of you understand your parents when they say Well, you know, you should live up to your potential Or there’s potential there And I would say, actually, most of the time when we’re dealing with the world What we’re dealing with is not the material world per se What we’re dealing with is potential It’s like, we’re dealing with what this could be And we’re trying to realize the potential And so another thing that you could think about with regards to the symbol of the dragon in particular That’s the predatory reptile more basically Is that it’s a representation of potential And so, I think the reason that it takes reptilian form And we’re going to talk about this in great detail Is I think that what happened as we evolved Is that the systems that we originally evolved to detect predators Constituted, we underwent the cognitive revolution That transformed the world into abstract representations around us That initial predatory detection system was elaborated up into the system that we used to detect the unknown as such But, you know, because it’s evolution The fundamental elements that evolved over the course of evolution remained intact We’re using the same systems And that system has a language And the language is something like The language is something like Well, the unexpected event is sort of like the snake in the grass Which is perfectly reasonable You can think about it as a metaphor I think it’s deeper than a metaphor But you can think about it as a metaphor And I would say, well, there are optimal sized We have optimal sized adversaries And I don’t think you can live without an optimal sized adversary Which is also an interesting It’s a very interesting idea Because, you know, one of the things that people always ask This is a very metaphysical discussion Is, you know, why there has to be evil and horror in the world It’s like, well, it’s not clear to me that the world could be constituted In the manner that it’s constituted In any acceptable way If there were no adversaries It’s like, well, maybe the snake in the garden is necessary You know, maybe that imperfection And also that adversary is necessary It’s the thing that spurs on development It… what would there be without an adversary? Maybe nothing You know, because you… Like, I can give you an example It’s a funny example There’s this little animal Whose name I cannot remember, unfortunately But it lives in the ocean And in its larval stage it has a brain And it swims around It’s a little tiny thing It swims around, you know, like a little plankton and so on And then at some point during its development It fastens itself onto a rock And it grows into something that sort of looks like a plant You know? But it’s stable It never moves again So as it develops into this stable rock clinging entity It basically digests its own brain And then it doesn’t need one after that And the reason it doesn’t need one is Well, there isn’t really anything for it to do It just sits there and filters water It takes like a sponge, sort of It takes the nutrients out of the water And the brain is just like its extra energy using tissue And so it doesn’t need the brain anymore And so, you know, it’s like You don’t need to think if you haven’t got an adversary So then you think, well, are there optimal sized adversaries? And part of the little motif of that story is If you pay careful attention to things as they change Maybe you can keep the damn adversaries optimized And I think that actually It may not be true But it’s possible that it’s true And that’s something, you know That’s something Because the question might be And this is something that I thought about When I was developing all these ideas a long time ago It’s like, okay, well, there’s obviously some things about existence That aren’t exactly the way you might lay them out If you had the choice Like the fact that people are fundamentally vulnerable And that you’re imperfect in 50 different ways And that life is full of suffering And everybody dies And, you know, all these things that are existential nightmares It’s like, okay, fine It’s easy to judge that as unacceptable And maybe even worse than unacceptable You know, intolerable You know, deserving of obliteration You can even go that far And people do go that far But there’s another question that that question begs Which is, yeah, maybe But maybe if you brought all of your resources To bear on the problem Without holding back all of them Then that would be okay Then you could master it And that’s possible You know? So you won’t The thing is, you’ll never know unless you try it That’s the thing Because it’s actually a claim that requires an existential proof You can’t listen to someone tell you that And even if it’s true for them That doesn’t necessarily mean it would be true for you The only way you can test a proposition like that is existentially You have to act it out But as I mentioned earlier I see very, very few truly optimistic ideas in profound thought Most profound ideas are pretty damn pessimistic But this is one I think that’s an exception to that Which is, it is possible that you’re constituted So that you have enough resources to deal with reality As it actually lays itself out And one of the ways And people have been thinking about this for a very long time too Is that the most effective One of the most effective weapons you have in that engagement Is the capacity to pay attention And paying attention And it’s another thing I’ve learned over the years And that’s been extraordinarily useful to me We kind of conflate rational thinking with attention And sort of make attention like the ugly step-sister of rationality in some sense Because we never really consider it as a separate entity Because we are basically rationalists And we believe that we can deal with the world in rational ways And I don’t think that’s really true Because I think the world has at its core It’s existentially irrational There’s too much of it that’s absurd and arbitrary But it is perfectly reasonable to draw a clear distinction Between paying attention and thinking And you know, Western culture is elevated thinking In some sense to the position of the highest deity But I think we’ve got that wrong I think attention is much more powerful than thinking And that attention, that thinking should be the handmade of attention Because if you pay attention You can pay attention to the things you don’t know And you can become incredibly powerful If you pay attention to the things you don’t know Because you keep learning and learning and learning and learning And you know, there’s a New Testament injunction That goes along the lines of, you know, it’s necessary to love your enemy And I actually think that that’s an existential hint You know, if you listen to people converse Especially if they’re ideologically minded You have a socialist on one side and a conservative on the other All they do is trade platitudes There’s no discussion And the goal of the discussion is to humiliate the other person And to prove that your a priori stance is correct And that that person is incapable of conceptualizing the world property It’s like, one of the most interesting things about running into people Who think differently than you If you pay attention instead of thinking Is they will tell you the weirdest bloody things, you know The things you never possibly have thought of And you know, it doesn’t mean that you have to fall over and agree with them immediately But what the hell difference does it make if they don’t think the same way you do? Maybe out of ten statements they’ll offer you one that you wouldn’t have conceptualized And that’s the difference between paying attention and thinking And like, people love to be paid attention to You know, it’s the currency, it’s a currency It’s human currency, it’s attention And attention is an unbelievably powerful tool You know, one of the things we’ll find out is that the ancient Egyptians actually Conceptually conceptualized attention as a god And the god they conceptualized attention as was Horus And you all know of Horus because you’ve all seen representations of Horus The famous Egyptian eye, the single eye, that’s a representation of Horus And the Egyptians figured out, like the Mesopotamians have before them That the highest human deity, which is like the most powerful set of human attributes Is to be associated with, one, with language use The Mesopotamians really nailed that But even more importantly with the capacity to pay attention and watch And it’s sort of suspension of judgment It’s like, you don’t have to be right or wrong in the situation All you have to do is pay attention and listen and watch And then potentially a solution will emerge out of that And look, half our brain is visual cortex, approximately So paying attention, we’re incredible visual animals Paying attention really matters It’s the harnessing, that’s visual attention in particular But that’s the harnessing of our most fundamental cognitive capacities So anyways, you know, if you pay attention to things You can see what interests you And that’s also an empirical search in some sense Which is quite interesting This is part of why I got interested in psychodynamic ideas It’s like there are things that rule the way that you govern yourself That you have no control over You can only discover them And one of them is what interests you You can’t really force it if you’re not interested in some things Like, well, good luck trying to make yourself interested Sometimes you can do it to some degree But more particularly what seems to happen is that your interest highlights things for you And then you follow that around Like you’re following a search beam or something like that And to me that indicates the action of very, very deep underlying Psychobiological systems that in some sense are directing your consciousness You know, if you pay attention to that process You can also learn a tremendous amount from that Like what you’re actually like What are you interested in? Where is your being trying to manifest itself? That’s another way of thinking about it So those are all things that we’re going to try to figure out Because I would also say that if you’re capable of allowing Your true being to manifest itself So that would be your potential That’s also the best source you have of the kind of weaponry That you need to defend yourself against the inequalities and tragedies and horrors of life Because you can reveal yourself in a sense by pursuing what’s illuminated for you And I can’t tell you whether or not that’s true But it’s a powerful idea And it’s a very old idea And I think there’s plenty of evidence that at least it is a It’s plausible Yes, it’s more than that But plausible will do because I can’t think of a better word in the moment But it’s a hypothesis that has enough potential that it might be worth testing And I would like you to test that sort of thing Like one of the things that I really encourage students in this class to do And you can start doing this right away Is pay attention to what you hear yourself say Just watch, pull yourself into tune Detach yourself from your ideas and thoughts And watch what you say And at the same time that you watch what you say Watch how you feel when you say what you say And what I’d like you to try to detect is you’ll notice if you start noticing That some of the things that you say make you feel strong and together and united And other things that you say make you feel disunited and weak And then I would say, quit saying the ones that make you feel disunited and weak Because they’re false And what you’re picking up by the loss of strength associated with that utterance Is the fact that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark With regards to that use of language It’s manipulative, you’re trying to appear smarter than you are You’re trying to prove a point You’re trying to avoid something Like there’s some game you’re playing that’s other than merely stating what you see to be true at that moment And that’s a different way to live Because you can calculate and you can plan And planning is useful I have nothing against that But you can manipulate reality so that it manifests what you want Or you can decide that what you’re going to do is pay attention And to call things as you see them And to see what happens if you do that And that’s a real risk, right? Because you don’t know where that’s going to take you So that’s an act of faith in the Kierkegaardian sense It’s like, if you have faith in the truth, what that means is that you will say the truth And that’s a hard thing to do It doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want, regardless of the effect on other people Or that you can use the truth as a baseball bat, which you can certainly do It’s a sophisticated… It requires a tremendous amount of sophistication But, you know, one thing you might think about is Well, if you are attempting to make yourself a mouthpiece of the truth, you have reality on your side And then you might say, well, could you possibly have anything more powerful on your side than reality? And so it might not be a reality you want or the thing that you would wish for But you might think, well, you know, if you called things as you saw them And you were very careful about that Maybe that would lead you through life properly It’s a very different way of thinking And it is tied with this idea that there’s something fundamental about the truth So I would say to start this, if you want, just pay attention to what you say You know, and like you’re detached from it So don’t identify too much with what you’re saying Because that’s another thing that people do, they identify with what they think It’s like, what makes you think that you’re thinking? It’s like one of the things Jung said, which I really loved, it blew me, it just flattened me when I first read it He said, people do not have ideas Ideas have people And so, you know, I listen to ideologues talk all the time It’s like, it’s not them talking, it’s some dead spirit of the past It’s, you know, voicing its opinion through them And you can tell when you’re talking to someone like that Because you can predict everything they’re going to say So in what sense is that them talking? It isn’t them talking at all, it’s some collective It’s a collective voice that has appropriated them and convinced them that it’s actually part of them It’s like, no, that’s a devil That’s what that is So just watch, you can try this experiment all on your own Try it for a month Attach yourself from what you say and think And notice, when you say something, if it makes you feel more grounded and powerful or weaker And stop saying things that make you weak So, you know, that’s sort of like existential test number one So, well, it must be just about four It’s four oh three So then, I’ll see you all next Wednesday Take a look at the website and I would say start those exercises Or at least check them out, okay?