https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=cFS6fPLQ024
Okay so we divided up the brain one way, and now we’re going to divide it up another way. And so this is the brain from the top down. And you know you have two hemispheres, and you might think, well why do you need two hemispheres? Do you know, by the way, some of you probably know this, that Gazzaniga, who’s a relatively famous neuropsychologist, studied split brain patients. Now you know that your cortical hemispheres, your brain is united down in the subcortical areas. They’re stuck together, although you have twins of many of the subcortical structures, like you have two hippocampi and two amygdala, for example, one on each side. But at the top, the hemispheres are quite separate, but they’re connected by the corpus callosum, which makes them communicate. It’s kind of interesting, because you kind of wonder, well why aren’t they just all glued together, you know? And what it seems to indicate is that there’s some utility of functional independence, combined with some utility of communication. You know, so it might be like, do you really want to be networked at the same time to everyone in the world? It’s like, no you don’t. You want some narrow channel pathways so that only the important information comes through. So it’s sort of maybe like the right hemisphere is one kind of computational device and the left hemisphere is another kind of computational device. Of course they’re not computational devices, but you get the point. And only the important information, the processed information from the right hemisphere goes across and only the processed information from the left hemisphere goes across. Something like that. Whatever. If you have someone who’s epileptic or that has a brain illness of some sort, of a specific type, it’s usually epilepsy, but not always, and you do surgery on them and you cut the corpus callosum, what you find, weirdly enough, is that each hemisphere develops its own personality. And so it’s kind of, and this is other evidence I would say for the idea that what the brain does is produce personalities. You can keep paring the brain down and what it’s going to do is produce lower and lower resolution personalities all the way down to the bottom. They’re just not as detailed. If you lost, say, 80% of your cortex randomly, you’d sort of be like a thumbnail of yourself. So you’d still be you, but just not at the same detail. So I’ll tell you, here’s an interesting idea from the Catholics. It kind of goes along with the avatar idea. So the Catholics had been wrestling for a long time with the question about how God could have fit himself in a human body, because you could imagine that would obsess Christians. Like God, this great big God, and you know, little bitty body. Put God in there, it just bursts the boundaries. Well, they have this idea called kenosis, which means emptying. And so the idea is that God had to empty himself out before he could inhabit a human body, and it’s very much like a thumbnail idea. And Jung would have, of course, thought exactly that the self was a thumbnail of God. I mean, he wouldn’t put it that way, but definitely that’s where his thinking was leading. So that’s a pretty damn cool idea. So anyways, so this is from… I developed this before I read what I’m going to tell you, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to talk about it from another theorist’s point of view. The guy I’m going to tell you about, his name is Elkonen Goldberg, and he’s a neuropsychologist, and he was one of Luria’s students who ended up in New York. And Goldberg was obviously influenced by Luria and all the Sokolov and Vinogadov and Gray and all those people that I’ve already talked to you about. And he was interested in why you have two hemispheres. Well, there’s a bunch of things that you can say, broadly speaking, about the hemispheres, and I’ve written some of them down there. So the right hemisphere. This is an idealized representation of a relatively highly lateralized right-handed male. And the reason I’m saying that is men seem to be more lateralized than women, and the right-handed lateralization is the standard kind. But you know, the brain can be lateralized all sorts of ways. What you might say is that there’s a bunch of ways of looking at it. One way you can look at it is that your cortex gets colonized by underlying structures. And that each underlying structure is likely to colonize a particular area. So for example, when you are born and you wake up and you see, your eyes are going to colonize your visual cortex, most likely, because it’s sort of adapted for that. But if you don’t have a visual cortex, then your eyes will colonize something else. So the brain has proclivities towards a certain kind of structure, but especially early in development, it’s unbelievably plastic. And so brains can be organized and lateralized in a bunch of different ways. So to simplify it, what you do is you kind of take, okay, well let’s take the most straightforward and typical brain and talk about it as if it’s the canonical brain. But I think what you can say is, regardless of where these systems are localized, they exist. So it’s an oversimplification. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. What you’ve got with regards to your cortices is a quick and dirty cortex, and that’s the right hemisphere, and then you’ve got a long-term detailed cortex, and that’s the left hemisphere. Left hemisphere is specialized for language. Language cuts things up into little tiny bitty pieces. You know, and that’s really useful if you’re doing little tiny bitty things. And you should be. Precision, right? Pinpoint accuracy. But that takes a lot of time and a lot of computation, whereas the right hemisphere says yeah, yeah, let’s get to the bloody point. You know, so it captures the thing in an image. So like the monster I showed you from the hippie cartoon, that’s a right hemisphere thing. It’s an image that represents a class of entities, which of course images do. Now there’s this woman named… can’t remember. Autistic woman. She’s developed cattle handling facilities all across… What’s her name? Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin. Yes, very cool person. I saw Temple Grandin speak at the University of Arizona at the Consciousness Conference, and it was like the funniest speech I’d ever seen in my life. Not because it wasn’t perfect, it was bloody perfect. She’s a tough woman. She looks like a cowboy. And she spent a lot of time with animals. She kind of comes out on the stage in her cowboy outfit, and she’s unbelievably straightforward and without nuance. She’s autistic. She’s severely autistic. And she, you know, her mother helped her a lot, and she developed this thing that she would go inside to compress her and hold her. It was like a little machine and that would comfort her. Anyways, she turned herself into quite the person, and she thinks, she thinks like an animal, which is why she can design cattle handling facility, often in slaughterhouses, so that the cattle don’t get all freaked out as they’re on their way to their eventual demise. So one of the things she does is she walks through where the cattle are going, and anything that bothers her, she assumes, will bother a cow. So for example, if the cows are walking through this spiral, they’re on their way to the slaughterhouse and there’s a Coke can lying on the ground, all the cows will stop and look at the Coke can. It’s anomalous. Now, she talked a lot about how she thought, and what she said was she could not devise abstract representations. So she said, okay, imagine how a child draws a house. Okay, so what is in a child’s house, right? There’s a triangle and a square on the left, and then there’s another rectangle and another kind of parallelogram, and then there’s a door and two windows, right? Then there’s a chimney with smoke coming out, which is quite cool. It’s like, why is that? Where’s the smoke? You know, you don’t see that in modern houses, but kids still do that. It’s like, and then maybe there’s a tree, and usually there’s a sun, and then house. It’s like, you think, oh, isn’t that cute, a simple drawing. It’s like, that drawing is not simple. You’ve never seen a house that looks like that in your life. It looks nothing like a house. It’s not a house, it’s not a picture, it’s a hieroglyph. It’s a pre-linguistic representation, and it’s like the essential elements of house. And so you might say what the child has done is extracted out all those things that are common across all houses, and then represented that. It’s not a drawing. Now if you take autistic people sometimes and you get them to draw, they’ll start in one corner of the house, and what they’ll draw is that house, like with every damn brick in place. So there are autistic people, for example, who they can look at a building and they can count every single window at one glance. And then there’s another guy in England who’s really famous. This guy’s just completely out of… he’s unbelievable. They take him up in a helicopter and show him a city that he’s never seen, then he goes home and has a piece of paper like as big as a wall, and he starts in one corner and he draws the entire city. You know, and he doesn’t sketch it out, right? It’s from the bottom up. And that’s autistic savant drawing. Often what happens is, it’s very realistic looking, you know. What happens if the autistic drawing savantler’s language is they start being able to draw? And that’s because the abstraction interferes with the realism. So it’s really hard to draw a hand. And the reason for that is if you draw a hand, you draw a hieroglyph of a hand. This is what a hand looks like. You try to draw your hand. It’s really strange. One of the really strange things about trying to draw your hand is that in order to draw it, you have to stop seeing it as if it’s a hand. And then it pops out and you think, my god, that’s the weirdest looking thing. It’s like a tree root. It’s like, you know, it’s a claw. Because if you look at your hand like that, it looks nothing like a hand. That’s how a hand looks. What the hell’s that? It’s like some sort of spider. But you have to see it that way before you can draw it. And so, well, partly what happens is that your capacity for abstraction interferes with your ability to see detail. And that’s probably good. It’s one of the ways that you simplify the world. Anyways, the right hemisphere looks like it’s specialized for anomaly. Now the way I look at it is this. Okay, so you’ve got your hippocampus down there and it’s keeping track of the comparison between what you want and what you think is happening. Bang. It emerges. It’s anomalous. You don’t know what the hell’s going on. And so you freeze. That’s the Maltoric representation. Then you start to feel anxious. Then the right hemisphere comes up with some pictures. What might this be? You can experience this at home for your own enjoyment. Let’s say you’re home at two in the morning and it’s dark and you’re alone. Okay, and maybe you’ve watched a horror movie so you’re all nicely primed. You know, and then you hear a noise in another room and that noise shouldn’t be there. And so you’re going to go investigate, right? And so let’s say the door is just a little bit open and it’s dark in the room and you have to put your hand in to turn on the light. It’s like you just watch what your imagination populates that room with. When you do that it’s like, you know, guy with axe, snake, alligator, like whatever. But your right hemisphere is going, there may be one of this class of dangerous things in there. And what it’s doing is basically coming up with a hypothesis. What sort of monster might be in there? And you’re all sort of freaked out about that even though you know that, you know, who knows what happened. You know, nothing. Something creeped. But you’re all like on edge. Because your brain doesn’t work at night like it does in the day. And everyone knows that. Wake up in the middle of the night it’s like all manner of horrors go through your imagination. And that usually happens when you’re asleep. You’re asleep for that most of the time. But sometimes you wake up and it’s like you worry about everything. So anyways, so that’s the right hemisphere. It’s coming up with pictures of what might be there. And they’re generally monstrous pictures and the reason for that is, well it’s obvious what the reason for that is. Now you’ll probably turn the light on and look anyways even though you might sort of peer around the corner and then when there’s nothing you’ll be embarrassed about how foolish you are. But you can see the instinctual behaviour right there and it’s wise. You know, there’s a low probability that something terrible is there. But zero times, like low probability times infinity equals large danger. So if there’s a two percent chance that there’s a killer in there, it pays to be a little on the tense side because being killed really sucks. And so you’re primed to feel negative emotion more intensely because you’re so vulnerable. So anyways, that’s kind of what the right hemisphere is up to. It does quick and dirty representation. But it also does categorization. So it doesn’t give you exactly realistic representations of what’s there. What it does instead is gives you categorical representations. And so you might say, how should you represent an unknown danger? You should use an amalgam of all known dangers to represent it. And that is what it is in a sense, you know. That’s why I talked to you earlier about the category of all dangerous things. So the Aborigines in Australia have this category which is women, fire, and dangerous things. It’s like, well you think, well why are all those things in that category? It’s like, well it’s not that hard to figure out if you think about it. But it’s also a category that you very frequently see, say in Disney cartoons. So the Wicked Queen for example in Sleeping Beauty. I mean she’s constantly bursting into flames and turning into a dragon and no one seems to object to that. Yes, it makes perfect sense that the Wicked Queen would turn into a fire breathing dragon. It doesn’t make any sense at all. But although it does, it’s not a rational transformation. But because it’s in keeping with an archetypal structure, everybody goes, yeah of course that’s what she’s going to do. It happens all the time in Disney movies, like Ursula. Remember her from The Little Mermaid? She’s trying to keep her daughter from becoming conscious. Yeah, nice mother doing that. And she traps old Zeus. She squeezes his soul to death and traps him in the underworld. Because he’s also… well we won’t get into that. But anyways, what happens to Ursula is when you finally get her irritated, now she grows into this huge ship destroying storm monster that’s part octopus. A giant octopus. You think, well that makes sense. Okay it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it’s a kind of hypothesis. Now that’s a representation of mother nature. Red in tooth and claw. And there’s also a reason that that’s female. It’s not female, it’s feminine. It’s actually a different thing. But we’ll get to that. So the right hemisphere, well it’s specialized for anomaly. It does quick and dirty analysis under the influence of the limbic system. It’s not linguistic, so I would say it’s still dominated by the subcortical systems. And my suspicion is that animals are still dominated by the subcortical systems. Their brains work from the bottom up. We have a top-down module, and that’s at least in part the left hemisphere linguistic system. And it’s a new thing that people have. And it’s based on our capacity to abstract, so that would partly be visual, like hieroglyphic, and then also to transform things into linguistic form. And it seems to me that that’s the part that we really identify as ourself, right? Because it’s weird. Let’s say you’re home alone, and you get freaked out and all these images come to mind. You know, you think of those images as part of you? You think more, there are things that appeared to you. And that’s what you think about your dreams. They’re things that appeared to you. They’re not you. It’s like, why would you think that? I mean, they’re in your experiential space. Why is there that separation between you and your dream? I had a dream. Not I thought up a dream, or look what I created. It’s like, there you are, the observer, and up comes a dream. It’s very, very weird. And it shows you that there are forces operating in your psyche that are impersonal, genuinely impersonal. And of course, that’s part of what you would call the collective unconscious. And it’s the thing that generates these weird images and protects you. So it’s nature, that’s for sure, and it can be absolutely terrifying. I mean, people can have dreams that are so terrible that, well, like the one my little nephew had, that’s pretty damn nasty. Little greasy dwarf things with big beaks. I mean, that’s an ugly, that’s a very ugly representation. And then if that wasn’t bad enough, there had to be a fire breathing dragon behind them, creating them endlessly. Like, it’s no bloody wonder he was waking up screaming. It’s like, oh no, I figured out what life is like. It’s like at four. That’s pretty traumatic. So, okay, now the left hemisphere. This is Alcon and Goldberg’s hypothesis. You’ve got one hemisphere or system that operates when you know what you’re doing and when what you want is happening. And that’s the happy talky part that thinks it knows what the hell is going on. And then you have another part that only turns on when you don’t know what’s going on, and it’s full of anxiety and negative emotion. The right hemisphere, by the way, is specialized for negative emotion. If you sustain right prefrontal damage, you become inappropriately happy. And you think, well, you’re full of positive illusions. You think, well, that’s an excellent thing. It’s like it’s not. You make really impulsive risky decisions and your life goes directly to hell. Because you need the negative emotion, obviously. You know, the reason you suffer with negative emotion is because if you didn’t suffer with negative emotion, you’d suffer from being destroyed. Those are your options. There are people, by the way, who are born without pain. And so you think, hey, that’s a good deal. It’s like they never last past 20. And part of the reason for that is you don’t notice this, but while you’re sitting there, you’re going like this all the time. And the reason for that is that if you sit for any length of time on one part of your body, then it doesn’t get much blood and it doesn’t get oxygenated. So if you do that, it bitches a little bit, a little pain. So you shift. You shift and you shift. And so you’re just doing this all the time, because otherwise you wear out your damn body or you get bedsores or that sort of thing. Well, these people that don’t have any pain, they just wear themselves out. So you need the negative emotion. It keeps you going. And it can get out of hand and have its own pathologies, but it’s definitely necessary. So the right hemisphere does negative emotion, inhibition of behaviour. That’s the freezing that’s intended on anxiety. Does image processing, holistic thinking. So it’s the quick and dirty hemisphere. Pattern recognition, pattern generation, and gross motor action. And that’s interesting too, right? Because the gross motor action is, again, the quick and dirty stuff. If you need to slap something away, it doesn’t really matter that it’s a gross motor gesture. You don’t have to go like this and be precise. It can just be fast and sloppy and it’ll still work. Now the left hemisphere is specialized for when you know what the hell’s going on and you can concentrate on the details. So then you can think about it in terms of the hierarchy that we discussed, right? So what it implies is that at the level of specific fine detailed motor output, the left hemisphere is operating. And so that’s kind of associated with positive affect. I know exactly what I’m doing and I’m making minor adjustments and everything’s going well. And then if you go up the hierarchy towards more and more abstracted representations, that’s moving over into right hemisphere space. And so that’s also partly why when you disrupt those higher order structures, that well, literally all hell breaks loose. So left hemisphere, operation and explored territory, positive emotion, activation of behaviour, so that’s also exploration. Word processing, linear thinking, detail recognition, detailed generation, and fine motor action. So you need one system that works when you don’t know what’s going on and you need another system that works when you do. Because sometimes you’re where you don’t know what you’re doing and sometimes you’re where you do know what you’re doing. Now Ramachandran, who’s a fairly famous neurologist who operates out of LA, he associated the totalitarian ego with hyper domination of the left hemisphere. And the reason he did that is very cool. So he’s got these patients that have, what’s it called, is it agnosia? It isn’t. We’ll call it neglect. Neglect. Okay, so this is what happens. You have a stroke and the stroke affects the back part of the right hemisphere. So what happens? Your left side is paralyzed. You can’t do anything with it. So however, you also don’t notice that it’s not working. So one of the things you might do if you do become aware, you’re laying in bed, you’ve had a stroke, and for some reason you notice that there’s an arm lying in there with you and then what you do is you pick it up with your other hand and you try to throw it out of the bed. And when you find out that it’s attached to you, because it’s not your arm, you’re not very happy or maybe you throw yourself right out of bed. And then if someone gets you to draw a clock, you draw half a clock. And if you eat a plate full of food, you eat half the plate unless someone turns it and then you eat half of that. And so half the world is gone. It’s hard to imagine what that would be like, eh? But I think what it’s sort of like is you know how there’s a whole world behind you and you don’t detect it as not there. Like it’s not black or anything, like when your eyes are closed. It’s just not there. And I think what happens with people with neglect is that the not there becomes three quarters instead of just half. It’s something like that anyways. So fine. You don’t know what’s going on and there you are like this and someone says to you, I noticed that you can’t move your left arm today. And what do you say? You say, well that’s because I’m tired. Or you say, I don’t feel like moving it. And so forth. So you have this reason that you’re not going to move it. You might say the same thing about the left foot or whatever. It’s like, yeah, well I don’t feel like moving it. And you’ll have some story about why you’re not going to move it. Okay, so that’s fine. So Freudians thought about that as traumatic denial. You know, that it was so overwhelming to you that you lost the left part of your body that you couldn’t face it and you just denied it happened. It’s not a bad theory. It’s not quite right, but it’s not a bad theory. So fine. So I’ll tell you a couple of associated stories. Let’s say you’re on dialysis. That sucks. You have to have this big thing in your arm that’s like a shunt and then you have to get hooked up to a dialysis machine like all the time because your kidneys are failing. And so who wants that? Nobody. So everybody thinks time for a kidney transplant so then they’re on a long waiting list and they get one kidney. That’s not very many kidneys. And so then they say, okay, you got your kidney and everyone’s thrilled about that. Here’s your anti-rejection medication. Make sure you take it. And so then a year later you lose your kidney. Why? Because you don’t take your damn anti-rejection medication. That’s the most common reason you might think. Well why in the world would you not take your anti-rejection medication? Well the Freudians would say denial. Here’s a different hypothesis. Your whole map of you is person with kidney. And then you lose your kidneys and it’s like you’re a whole weird thing that you have no idea about and it’s virtually impossible for you to update your model. And you think, well does that make any sense? Have you ever lost a tooth? Right. What does your tongue do for like six months? You’re sitting there and your tongue is like fiddling away in there like a mad dog, investigating every teensy nook and cranny. Like it’s an obsessive exploratory device. And it does it even when you don’t want it to. And then six months later you get your mouth remapped. It’s like that’s just a tooth, man. Lose a kidney and see what happens. Or lose the whole left side of your body. It’s like what are you going to do about that? So then Ramachandran, he’s testing these people for balance. And so what he does is he checks out this phenomenon called nystagmus. And so if you pour cold water in someone’s ear their eyes will move back and forth because it screws up the… you know you have a balance system in your ear and if you pour cold water in there it screws it up and then your eyes move back and forth. You know it’s not very pleasant. So what he found was that if he poured water, cold water in the left ear, then all of a sudden the people would wake up and go, oh my god I don’t have the left side of my body. And then they would have a catastrophic emotional experience. They’d be all upset about it and crying away, which is of course what they should do. And then twenty minutes later it would wear off and then you’d say, well you know is there anything wrong with your left side? And they’d say, well yeah I just don’t feel like moving it. So what seems to have happened is something like, so there’s a body representation centre let’s say in the back of the right hemisphere and you blow that sucker out with a stroke and that means you can’t represent that part of your body anymore. But maybe there’s tatters of it left, like it’s like a network that’s damaged and under some conditions you can more or less get it to operate so you pour some cold water in the ear and you shock the whole system and then there’s enough neurological activity So the network kicks in, even though it’s damaged for like ten minutes, and then you get this tremendous burst of negative emotion which is what the right hemisphere should be doing when you lose half your body and you experience that and the old left hemisphere is like flapping away trying to account for this, which it can’t because it’s such a massive, utter catastrophe. But then you know the shock wears off and bang the system shuts back down and poof you’re back in denial. So that’s a good example of the relationship between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere has a fixed idea about the world. So in some sense you might think about it as the instantiation of your latest avatar. You can certainly see that with people who are ideologically possessed, right? They’ve got this verbal system that accounts for the whole world and there’s just no damn way that thing’s going anywhere. So you know and it’s got this totalitarian aspect because it wants to explain every last thing. It doesn’t like anomaly at all. It hasn’t come to terms with anomaly at all. And there’s no sense of transformation within the system, which is partly why totalitarian systems die. It’s like the Red Queen said to Alice in Wonderland when she was in the underworld, in my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. That’s why totalitarian systems don’t work. It’s because the damn environment keeps shifting around on them. You know and if they’re fixed in place, the gap between their theory and reality gets larger and larger and larger and larger until finally they fall into a pit and that’s the end of it. So that’s what happens to people too if they don’t stay updated. If they let things get away on them. Eventually the ignored reality comes flooding back and we’ll see that represented in mythology because it’s represented very nicely in mythology. That’s why often dragons in fairy tales for example, and in the St. George story, and in The Hobbit for that matter, the dragon is an eternal thing. It lives underneath the earth and most of the time it leaves you the hell alone. But now and then it comes back and it tries to destroy the city. And then you have to zip out there and fight the thing so you get it to go back in its hole and maybe you get the treasure that it’s carrying and then it’s back in the hole for a while but that thing’s coming back. It’s always coming back. So you build the walls and all that, that’s fine. But a dragon can destroy any walls and so walls aren’t enough. You have to be prepared to go out there and fight the damn thing and that’s how you keep it at bay. And you know, that basically means that you have to maintain everything you build. It’s something like that, right, because otherwise it falls apart with increasing entropy. So alright, so. Goldberg thought about this as an anomaly system, a novelty system, and a routinization system but I tended to think about it more from an anthropological or what would you call it, an ethological perspective, thinking about an animal, us, in our natural environment. It’s not so much novelty versus routinization. It’s explored versus unexplored territory. And that’s what the world’s made out of. It’s made out of explored versus unexplored territory. And so there’s a domain that you inhabit, which is the center of the universe from a mythological perspective with you right in the middle of it, and around you is this circle which is your place that you move around with you and in that circle you know what the hell’s going on. And that’s partly because you’ve mapped it, but it’s also partly because you don’t go outside of it. You know, so you have your friends and you have your routine and that’s nested inside your culture and you try to keep that thing from flipping upside down and you do that all sorts of ways, partly by doing the same thing all the time, but also partly by refusing to go anywhere that might seriously challenge your beliefs. And you know, fair enough, you can understand that although it makes you weak to do that because you’re not as prepared as you might be. So you could say, you know, human beings are tribal, social animals that have a territory and the territory, then you think, well what’s the territory? Well let’s say tree dwelling chimp ancestors. Territory is the jungle. It’s like, no it’s not. That’s not the territory. The territory is a little bit of the jungle plus the things that come in from outside plus the primate dominance hierarchy that exists in that area. Right, right. So that’s the territory. That’s the environment. Because for mythological reasons we tend to make a separation between the environment and culture. But it’s, yes, makes sense at one level of analysis, but at another level of analysis all it does is screw you up because your territory fundamentally isn’t the world, not the natural objective world. You want to stay as far away from that thing as you possibly can. Your territory is that circle of people with whom you spend 90% of your time. And so if you’re a chimp for example, or some other kind of monkey, highly social, what do you do all day? You sleep, you eat, you chew leaves if you’re a chimp, and you groom other chimps. Like it’s constant social interaction and you’re jockeying for position in the dominance hierarchy like mean girls in that movie, you know. And you’re mapping out the social territory, knowing who’s who and what’s what, and then trying to get up somewhere near the top. And that’s your environment. That’s your environment. And so your world is that social, natural circle, which is a four dimensional territory because it’s got length, width, and height, plus it stretches across time, so it’s this transforming natural entity, and then inside that there’s a pyramid. And the pyramid is made out of all the primates that you interact with. And that’s the world. A circle with a pyramid on it. Now I’ll give you a vision. This is a vision I had once when I was trying to figure this stuff out. Okay, so what is the world? So imagine that there’s a field in front of you that stretches as far as you can see. And then you’re flying above it. And what you see everywhere are these pyramids. Let’s say for the sake of argument that they’re like skyscrapers made out of glass. There’s tears in them. And you fly down, and one’s here and one’s here, and some of them overlap, and some of them are really big and some of them are small. But they’re just everywhere. And you’re flying around above them, and you fly close enough to look inside, and what you see inside them are people all packed together trying to scramble up to the top. And that’s the world. That’s the reality. And the funny thing is that you could be in one of those pyramids clambering away to the top, or you could be flying above it. Those are your options. And if you have to choose, you should be flying above it. And so the relationship between the self and the ego avatar is the same as the relationship between the thing that is flying above and the thing that’s within one of those pyramids trying to scramble to the top. You know, you say, well I’m going to get to the top. Top of what? Well there’s a hundred tops. There’s two hundred tops. Then you might say, is there anything above the top? Well there is. There’s this part of you that isn’t entrapped within that particular system, and that can move from place to place. If you look at Egyptian mythology. So you know, you see on the back of the American dollar bill, that’s a symbol of value, right? Okay, so what’s the pyramid? There’s a pyramid on it, right? What’s the top of the pyramid? It’s a triangle. It’s separate from the pyramid. There’s an eye inside it. That’s because the top of the pyramid is an eye, and it’s separate from the pyramid. And what that means, fundamentally, is that the thing that transcends the structure is attention. Voluntary attention. Now, the Egyptians worshiped voluntary attention in the form of Horus, because he was a god, right? Horus. And I’ll tell you about Horus in detail. But one of Horus’ avatars was the falcon. And the reason for that is falcons can really, really, really, really see. And they fly around. And so they’re like the king’s eyes, like the little bird Zazu in The Lion King, right? He was the king’s eyes, the thing that flies around above. And he was a particular enemy of Scar. Remember Scar eats him at the beginning and then spits him out. And the reason that the king’s eyes is an enemy of Scar is because the king’s eyes can see what he is. Right? And he’s the eternal force that works to disrupt the kingdom and bring everything into ruin. Classic myth. Partly accounting for why that was the largest selling, highest grossing cartoon in Disney history. They got the mythology pretty right. So okay. So attention. Okay, we’ll do this. So you might say, what’s a human being like? Here I told you that when Penfield was mapping the brain, he was poking people. And you can either poke them along the sensory strip, which is if the motor strip is here, the sensory strip is just behind it. And the motor strip is where the motor systems of your body are represented insofar as you can control them. And the sensory strip is where the sensory systems are represented insofar as you can feel them. So what this is, is that the body’s laid out weirdly on the motor cortex. One of the things that’s pretty funny is that the genitalia area in the sensory cortex is right beside the feet. And so I think that’s why people have foot fetishes and love foot massages, is because they’re spreading activation from the foot area to the genital area, and God only knows why that is. Maybe because you had to have really sensitive feet to tromp around without stepping on horrible things. Whatever. So you can put this weird, stretched out body representation together in a representational form like this. And they call that the homunculus, which is the little man that exists inside your brain. So what you see, that’s the motor homunculus, not the sensory homunculus. So what do you see? Well what’s a person as far as his brain is concerned? Well, hand, that’s for sure. Thumb, that’s for sure. It’s like your thumb is represented as your whole body, and it’s because your chest, your torso, is hardly represented at all. Why is that? It’s like, well how many things do you manipulate with your chest? Like none. Right? So you don’t have motor control over it, so it’s not represented. But the hands, man, those things, they’re represented like mad. And so is the face, and the lips, and the tongue. And there’s a bunch of reasons for that. One is that when you’re an infant, you explore like mad with your mouth. But you do that through your whole life, because when you eat, you know what it’s like. If you’re eating something and there’s a bit of sand in it, like you find it and you take it out. It’s like you can detect this teeny little thing that’s not supposed to be in your mouth. Well that’s a good thing, because lots of things aren’t supposed to be in your mouth. So that’s part of the reason. Then the other part of the reason is, well think about what you do with your tongue. I mean there’s a lot of things you do with your tongue. Some of them are eating, some of them are talking, some of them are all sorts of intimate behaviours. That thing is wired up, and it’s wired up right at birth. And then it’s the same with your lips and the rest of your mouth. You use that to communicate. So your hands wander around taking the world apart and putting it back together, which is exactly what your brain does, and then you blab about what you’re doing to everyone. And that’s basically a human being. I like to think of this thing as, it’s sort of the, it’s a comical representation of the hero that goes out to confront the world, right? Because the hero has two elements, and one is explorer. And that’s sort of, that’s where the West is powerful I would say. Like we have a really well-developed mythology of the exploratory hero. But where we’re not so well-developed is the second part, because in the second part of the classic hero story you’re supposed to come back and communicate about what you’ve found. And so there’s an individual exploration element, and then there’s a communicate and update the culture element. And both of those are equally important, and it’s something that we don’t do well, we don’t have much respect for tradition in the West, and it’s a really, really big problem. Because the ethical responsibility of a human being is to take the dead culture, so that’s the dead father, or the dead god, and to revivify it with attention and communication. And you fail to do that, then everything disappears. And we are failing to do that, we’re leaving it all behind instead. It’s not a good idea. You know, if the old gods die, as Nietzsche said they had, new gods swoop in very rapidly, and if you think the old god was bad, you wait until the new gods get a hold of you. So well, we saw what happened in the 20th century, right, with all the ideologies that sprang up in the absence of classical religious belief. It’s like, okay, you’re not so thrilled with Catholicism if you think about that as the fundamental tradition of the West, with the witch burnings and the Inquisition and all that. It’s like, yeah, yeah, well, get a load of the Nazis and then see what you think. Or the Communists for that matter. It’s like, from bad to worse, in an unimaginable way. And it’s partly because those archaic systems, those archaic religious systems, they weren’t They’re a whole different class of thing. And we don’t understand them very well, and it’s not good because you cannot live without understanding them. You don’t know who you are. And then you fall prey to weird mental diseases like nihilism, that’s one, and the other one is ideological possession. So you become a totalitarian or a nihilist, and that’s a bad outcome. And you might think, well, what’s the alternative? Well, you know what happens in Pinocchio, right? You’ve watched Pinocchio? Okay, I often show Pinocchio to this class, but I don’t know if I’m going to do that this year. But anyways, Pinocchio, he’s a puppet, marionette. Someone else is pulling his strings. He has a wooden head. He’s not very bright. He hasn’t banged around the world at all. He’s got a good father, the old Geppetto, who really would rather that he was a real boy, right? A real person. So he’s the kind of father that wants to produce an individual and not a slave. So and that’s why, you know, in his workshop it’s all friendly and there’s a nice fire and he’s making toys and there’s lots of music. It’s like, go Geppetto, he’s a good guy. So he makes this little puppet and he sends him out in the world. He says, go be a real boy. Well, Pinocchio runs into a whole class of different obstacles. One is evil, right? That’s the coachman and the Italian stereotype guy who makes him a dancing puppet celebrity, which I think is pretty funny. I mean, that’s really prescient, you know, because you might think, well, what’s the goal of your typical boneheaded, you know, mid adolescent in North America? It’s like unearned celebrity. Well, that’s exactly what Pinocchio goes for first. And that doesn’t work out so well because he ends up a slave and then the next thing that happens is he capitalizes on the fact that he’s vulnerable and pretends he’s sick and goes off for a vacation under the direction of the coachman who’s basically Satan in disguise. And then he goes out to Treasure Island, Pleasure Island, and meets all the delinquents who are just like Nazis and it turns out that in fact the whole ploy is to enslave everyone, to deprive them of their voice, that’s the donkey’s braying, and to make them into slaves. Pretty damn horrifying. And that movie came out about the same time that the Nazis were really grasping power in Central Europe. It’s like they got it exactly right. Here’s what’s really going on behind the scenes. So and then what happens? Well Pinocchio turns halfway into a braying donkey because he’s gone off the path and in order to get back on it he tries to go home. But it’s too late. He’s grown up. You can’t go home. He’s not a kid anymore. He goes home and Dad isn’t there. Surprise, surprise. Because once you grow up and you go home, Dad isn’t there. It’s just another human being. So then what happens? Well then he has to go into the ocean. Now that’s particularly weird, right? It’s like there he is, half donkey, he’s a puppet. The dove comes down and drops him a message from God. It’s like the Holy Spirit descending, except it’s actually from the blue fairy weirdly enough. And the message says you have to go to the deepest part of the ocean and rescue your father. It’s like yeah, that is what you have to do if you don’t want to be a bloody puppet donkey. You have to go down into the depths and find your dead father and you have to revivify him. And that’s what happens. So Pinocchio goes way down there to the deepest depths and finds Monstro, who’s a monster so terrible that the fish swim away just at the sound of his voice. Just like, what’s his name? He who shall not be named. Voldemort, right? You can’t even say his damn name. Same with Monstro. Pinocchio goes down there, goes into the whale. What happens? Geppetto says there’s no getting out of this. There’s no getting out of this. We just have to sit here and cook fish. And Pinocchio thinks, cook! And then he starts breaking up all the chairs and everything and his father’s freaking out. It’s like, what are you doing breaking all these chairs? What are we going to sit on? And then Pinocchio lights them on fire. He’s a master of fire. It’s a shamanic ritual. But he is a master of fire. That’s what a human being is. He gets everything burning. Of course, Geppetto’s all freaked out about that because what are they going to sit on? And Pinocchio thinks, who cares about sitting? We’re going to solve the problem once and for all. And so then the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon, which is a pretty damn weird thing for a whale to do. Half kills Pinocchio. He washes up on shore dead, but he saves his father. And then at the very end of the movie, he’s lying on his bed all drowned. They’re all having a… So he’s a dead puppet now. It’s like, do you want to be a live puppet or a dead puppet? Well maybe the dead puppet is better than the live puppet. It depends on where you’re going. So then he’s on the bed. The blue fairy comes down and says, well you’ve been honest and courageous. Bang! Now you’re real. And then they have a little party. And that’s just exactly right. We got that exactly right. So that’s part of the hero mythology, is the rescuing of the father. Why do you have to rescue the father? Because otherwise you’re a corpse. You’re a historical creature. You’re a cultural creature. You cannot live without your culture. You think you can, but you can’t. It disappears. And you don’t even… look, I’ll give you an example. In the Mesopotamian creation myth, which I’m going to tell you about next week, one of the things that happens is that the first round of gods, so they’re like primordial forces, they’re pretty damn careless. And they kill their father. And they make this place to live on his corpse. Okay, that’s where we live. We live on the corpse of our ancestors because we live in this society. It’s dead. It’s the product of dead people. So it’s got this dead element, but we’re living on it. Okay, they’re very careless. They kill it. So they render it completely dead. Well what happens is Tiamat, who’s the mother of chaos, she comes flooding back and she thinks, oh you killed the thing that protects you. You just wait to see what happens and that’s exactly it. You killed the thing that structures you. You won’t know it. It’s like Nietzsche’s prediction from the death of God. It’s like, you killed this. You think, oh it doesn’t make any difference. It’s like, ha, wrong. It’s like the striders protecting the hobbits. You get rid of that thing that protects you and chaos comes flooding in and you have no idea what’s possible. We do though because we lived through the 20th century. We know exactly what’s possible. Hundreds of millions of unnecessary deaths. That’s what’s possible. We’re lucky we didn’t blow the whole damn thing up. And we still could. So people pursuing their dead ideologies. You don’t rescue the dead father, you’re the puppet of death. That’s what you are. Okay, now on that cheery note.