https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9RMPC4ry9Ac
The big topic I’ve been thinking about lately is around Bret Weinstein and his idea of metaphorical truth, which is interesting because it’s come up a number of times, and I think there’s a little bit of confusion here that I can clear up because there’s a glaring gap from my perspective in how people are using this concept. And that’s what I’d like to sort of explain today is what I think is missing, why I think it’s important, and hopefully it’ll give you some contrast, right, to help you see something that I think is very important about the construction of metaphorical versus literal truth. Bret Weinstein’s got this brilliant tale he tells about the difference between metaphorical and literal truth, and I’m probably going to butcher it a little bit, but I’ll go for it. If there’s a porcupine and you are told that porcupines can throw their quills three feet, which is not true in the literal sense, it’s not a fact of like they can’t throw their quills, that doesn’t happen, but if that’s what you’re told, then you will almost certainly always keep a respectable distance from a porcupine. Very easy rule to remember, right, and it’s not literally true, but it’s metaphorically true, and it’s much more efficient than a literal truth answer would be, or at least that’s the implication. And then people are using this and say, aha, see, so metaphorical truth, we’re giving it a to do, right, we’re taking this idea seriously because we’ve pointed it out, but I think that even Bret doesn’t go far enough, because we’re not taking the other side of that argument. So I will grant you that metaphorical truth is better, more efficient, easier, and more survivable, right, like you’ll survive better in the world if you don’t think or don’t try to think about how close to get. You just say, I’m going to stay three feet away because the quills go three feet, and a lot of people don’t know this, you can die from porcupine quills. In fact, animals do all the time because when they get a puncture in their skin and there’s bacteria in it, it’s not hard to die, basically. Modernity has fixed that to some extent with good antibiotics, which are one of the few actual medical advancements that we’ve made, along with things like aspirin and some of the germ theory of disease stuff, all of which, by the way, is pretty much related. So it’s more survivable, it’s easy to remember, but what is the literal truth of how far away you should stay from a porcupine quill? Like, metaphorically, it’s three feet because they can throw their quills three feet. But what’s the answer literally? Because this is actually a much more interesting question to me. There’s probably no literal truth there at all. So the example’s sort of one-sided. There is a metaphorical truth, but I don’t think there is a literal truth, because the literal answer could be construed as, and I’m not saying that this is correct, because again, I don’t think there is a literal answer, but one possible literal answer would be one atom. You can stay one atom away from the tallest quill, or the quill closest to you, or whatever. The quill closest to the part of your body that is closest to the porcupine. There’s lots of constructions here, but hopefully you can already see the problem. How many things do I have to define to be literal enough to stay far enough away from the quills? Well, it turns out, of course, one atom is a silly answer. A, you can’t measure one atom, not by yourself easily. B, that only works if there’s no time, if there’s no motion. So I’m sort of equating time and motion, but I think that’s a fair move. And so it’s like, wait a minute. So one atom could be correct under unreal conditions, and we can’t measure it. So again, I don’t think it’s wrong. That is a literal truth answer to how far away you have to stay from a porcupine, but it’s not practical. It’s not practical across a number of dimensions. So we can say, all right, well, given the fact that things vibrate naturally, atoms are out, and we can’t measure it. Atoms are out. So let’s just go with a quarter of an inch. So now we’re a quarter of an inch away from the quill that is closest to us, roughly speaking. Fair enough. Still a lot of variables there, by the way. That’s not just two variables. You’ve got to calculate the quill, the location of whatever, but you have to account for the location of all your body parts in relation to all of the quills, roughly speaking. That’s a lot of calculation you’d have to do. And this may seem silly, but this is actually really important. It’s an important point. So, and you can also see, right, we’ve had to change perspectives. We change from a perspective with no time, where the answer is one atom. That perspective also contains the fact of an atom, and it implies that that’s knowable, but of course it’s not. It is in that perspective, it would have to be. Otherwise, that perspective doesn’t exist, but it does exist. It’s just not a useful perspective in the world, which is an interesting note. There are perspectives that you can hold that aren’t useful, that aren’t practical, they’re not actionable in the world, but you can hold those perspectives. Keep a note of that. That might be important. So we switch from that perspective with no time and all this measurement stuff that we can do to a different perspective where we’re accounting for time and motion, right, and you know, not just vibrational motion, which is the one atom, any vibration kills that, because any vibration is going to be greater than one atom, roughly speaking, or about one atom, in which case you’ll touch the quill, and right now it’s all over. So the real question, and look, you can make arguments about, well, it would take more than one atom of penetration, whatever. The point is still the point, right, which is you can’t narrow things down that way. So if we change it to half an inch or something, the problem is that now we have time and speed components to adapt to. So now it’s like, well, a half an inch for how long, given the direction that we’re moving, the direction that the porcupine’s moving, the fastest possible speed at which the porcupine can move relative to us. So that’s our fastest possible speed plus a calculation. So we’ve just added a bunch of variables. Now, that still doesn’t allow us to answer the question, right, because even within that, there’s some variability. So we’re down to probabilities. Well, you can say, look, Mark, probabilities are literal or literal enough, but it’s not literal, and it may not be literal enough, because it’s still a non-zero chance. And so these things are not as easy to nail down as they appear. You can’t just say, look, there’s two types of truth in the world. There’s literal truth and metaphorical truth, and we take metaphorical truth seriously, but we also take literal truth seriously. Yeah, I don’t think you do, right, because I don’t think literal truth is as knowable or understandable or reasonable or as useful as you think it is, whereas metaphorical truth seems very useful, even though it could be literally untrue. So the real question is, well, which one should have primacy, right? And the traditions, right, all of the religious traditions, all the history, basically, well, they’re not really religious traditions, because the ancients wouldn’t have thought of them that way. The conception of religion that we have today is from like 1530. So everybody before that had a different, didn’t have a conception of religion the way we do. Religion was just the way the world was, and you’re roughly discovering it. That’s like alchemy is trying to discover those sorts of things. So in that frame, all of the traditions, all of history, all of the cultures we know about, we’re using religious metaphorical frameworks for understanding and navigating the world. Now, you can argue there are better ways to understand some things with science. That’s absolutely 1,000 billion trillion percent correct. But how many things? Where are the limits? At what point does literal break down, right? And at what point, because I’ve already demonstrated it, at what point are literal explanations not actionable? Because some of them aren’t actionable. I don’t know how many. Maybe the majority aren’t actionable. I have no idea, right? Because without perspective, and in physics this is called the observer problem, it was kind of brought up by Einstein with relativity, you know, the observer matters. And the will of the observer matters too. Not just for quote observation, but for participation. And so once you start to participate with something, you need a framework for doing that. It’s a worldview, could be a quote grand narrative, which I’m a fan of, so I’m not getting around grand narrative. So what’s driving that? Because that’s what’s driving you. That’s not science. There’s no way to science that. It’s not scienceable. This is more a question of quality and not quantity. And science is excellent at quantity. Oh, so beautiful at quantity. Can’t do anything about quality, though. Nothing at all. And so the quality of the answer of the metaphorical versus literal truth matters. The quality of the metaphorical truth is that it requires very little thought. It requires very little measurement. Dead reckoning guesses will work, roughly speaking. These aren’t absolutes. There are no absolutes. So I’m just saying on average for most people, right? The ability to do it is straightforward. Like it’s relatively easy to keep three feet away from a porcupine. That’s something within your grasp. The literal answer doesn’t have any of those qualities. Now, you can come up with a literal answer that approximates the qualities of the metaphorical answer. The problem is it requires data collection beyond your ability in the moment and a bunch of assumptions that aren’t obvious. As I pointed out, the real literal answer is one atom. You just need to be the whatever body part of yours is closest to the whatever quill it’s closest to. You only need to be one atom away. That just has a bunch of constraints associated with it that are impractical. And there are a bunch of literal answers like that, where the literal answers that you could come up with, because you can generate a bunch of them. That’s the other problem. They’re combinatorially explosive, to use the John Verveke term. The number of these things explodes out. And so there’s no practical way to put that to use. It may seem practical. You could derive an answer. Absolutely. You can do this. You can derive an answer from a bunch of variables. But you can’t use those in real time in participation, because you just can’t make that many calculations. This is one of the areas where something like game theory falls down. So you look at the work of John Nash, and it quickly devolves into the idea that according to game theory, what we’re doing in our heads is we are doing trigonometry, roughly speaking, or at least advanced algebra, to make complicated decisions about the economy when we go to buy groceries at the store. It really does degrade that quickly. And so we’re not. I can’t even do algebra. I can’t even think about algebra. In fact, I’m surprised I can say algebra. Math is the worst. So we’re not doing that. That’s not happening. At the time that he came up with that, computers couldn’t even calculate to make decisions that fast. So this is crazy talk. The fact that math maps to it is interesting and wonderful and helpful, but only in hindsight. The predictive power of game theory and of economics in general is very low when things get complex. So as you add complexity, and complexity doesn’t take much, right? Like you add one item, and if it’s the wrong type of item, it can combinatorially explode the space of decision. These things don’t work in predictive ways very well. For some things they do. But again, in order for them to work predictively, what happens is they really squish the space down. Science supposed to do this, right? Reduce the number of free variables. So if you can reduce the free variables enough, prediction works. But you usually can’t. It’s not to say not always. You can always make predictions on things, especially if you’re going to get real specific about it. Or super general, by the way. It could be either way. But that’s not practical. Most people can’t use it. And that’s the pragmatic argument. If you can’t use it, its value is zero. And I mean you. Not if somebody could use it, but not you, because it’s not valuable to you. It doesn’t say it doesn’t mean value, quote, in the world. Although I might argue that value in the world is a tough thing to pin down. So there’s a way, again, in which metaphorical truth and literal truth are different. I will also point out, I’m not going to make a claim. I’m going to make an observation and a statement of possibility. It’s possible that the reason why there is a difference between, we’ll say, metaphorical and literal truth, as pointed out by Bret Weinstein, is because this is indicative, right? It’s an indication of two types of knowledge about the world. Two. Not four. Two. So this is going to segue into the model that we use on, as a modification to John Brevicki’s Four Types of Knowing. So I’m going to propose, and I’ll do this in another video with a slide, because I have a slide. I’m going to propose that it’s four types of information. They match the four types of memory, and that those four types of information have to be combined in some fashion to create knowledge. And they can create one of two types of knowledge, either intuitive knowledge or concrete knowledge. And so I’m going to go over that in detail in what hopefully will be my next video. But I have to prepare slides, and I wanted to show you this dichotomy between this literal versus metaphorical truth, although it’s not a true dichotomy, because I think they overlap, right? You can use both. Maybe they don’t always overlap, but there is an overlap between, we’ll say, metaphorical and literal. And that’s all just to set it up, really, for the slide. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. I hope that I was able to sort of get my idea across, and I hope that it segues well into the next video about the four types of information and the two types of knowing that I’m going to present, which may well be wrong, by the way. It’s just something we’ve been working on, and I’ve done some heavy modifications, too. And I’m not sure if Manuel’s happy with them, but we’ll find out. So yeah, we’ll give that a go. And thank you very much. Leave comments if you have questions, or if I wasn’t clear, or even if I was. Let me know what’s good, what’s bad, so that I can improve. And I really appreciate that you’ve engaged with the videos. And in my last video with Manuel there about the initiation to game B video is pretty popular, so that’s great. Really appreciate that. Hopefully we can get more people subscribing and engaging. And I just want to thank you for your time and attention.