Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks | EP 501

narratives are things that we use to see reality so sometimes narratives get reality right sometimes narratives are wildly on basis yeah that's in keeping with this idea of competition across time okay that's for sure but rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary it itself is a tool it's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in okay so that's if we get it right but if we mess it up then it does become something that we try to see reality through and we are we're in a problematic

[Music] situation today I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr Stephen Hicks who's a philosopher um with a uh uh Stellar academic career uh very good author and we talked about well we talked about his contributions to Peterson Academy first he's taught five courses at this new online university that some of you may be aware of and the rest of you should be as far as I'm concerned he's taught five courses there and we detailed out the structure of the courses and more importantly and more broadly I would say describe the rationale for studying

philos philosophy because he's a professor professional philosopher as an academic and so we discussed well the importance of a philosophical education we discussed the nature of the philosophical Endeavor over the last 3 or 400 years as it shifted from modernism to postmodernism to whatever is Dawning in this new age that's emerging and uh that constituted the bulk of our conversation and so if you're interested in that and you should be and if you're not you should ask yourself why then join us if the answer is no it's because you're unconsciously under the sway of some

skeptical philosopher and maybe you shouldn't be so join us anyways for that discussion so Dr Hicks it's good to see you again a pleasure yeah thank you for coming into Scotsdale today yeah much appreciated so I thought we would start by talking practically a bit about you've lectured you've done two lectures for Peterson Academy I've done five are out okay two are out you've done five excellent okay so run through that a bit tell people what you're teaching and what the experience was like and what how you understand the mission of this new Enterprise why

you got involved all of that if you would right well I'm a philosopher by training so my uh my my intellectual interest in is in what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like we got technological uh uh uh revolutions that we are in the engau and education has been very traditional and backward minded for for many centuries so in one sense we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies and obviously Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial so I've done many years of inclass teaching

many years of uh lecturing I had at my University a center for eth and Entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies uh as things came on asking what can be done uh because in many cases people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or uh and so forth so what I'm interested in though primarily though is uh the courses that I have taught over the course of many years uh having them in a vehicle that's obviously going to be accessible to more people but also uh in with

better production values and in a way that that can't in some cases be done even in a good in-person classroom in philosophy everything is controversial a big part of Education in life is philosophical education how many beliefs do I have in my mind how did they get into my mind in the first place where did they come from what's good for you what do you like what are your values what do you want your life to people philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract philosophers love their abstractions their general principles what we want is

to be much more careful but what happens in politics economics business family religion is because of philosophical ideas John lack Francis Bacon Renee Dart Carl Marx Fredick n they were the Great Geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world we're philosophers for goodness sake what is philosophy all about it's about a quest or coming to know true [Music] reality now my uh areas of expertise have been modern philosophy and postmodern philosophy when philosophers and historians we talk about the modern era essentially we mean the last 500 years which is been you know extraordinarily revolutionary not

only in philosophy but in How We Do religion How We Do Science how we treat women getting rid of slavery industrial all of that stuff it's been amazing uh and philosophy has its fingers in all of those pies and is part of it so partly what I'm interested in is the giant names in philosophy right and they're all Giants for a reason they're all over the map intellectually from decart to lock to Cod Hegel nche on into the 20th century uh what role they have played in making the modern world and then the postmodern world

happen and uh in some cases of course resisting what is going on in modernity and in postmodernity so the first two courses that uh the academy invited me to teach were on modern philosophy and essentially that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the Giants Renee dayart Francis Bacon John Lock laying a New Foundation overturning medieval philosophy uh medieval philosophy again much sophistication there had been a kind of dominant framework for a millennium and in very quick time things transformed themselves in the 1500s 1600s all of those uh intellectual cultural Transformations

uh that we that we study when we do the history and that course ends with the death of n in 1900 so essentially 1500 to 1900 eight lectures but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically because in some cases the philosophers are ones who make the historical Revolution happen as their theore theoretical ideas are applied in other cases the philosophers are responding to what's going on in the culture what's going on historically trying to make sense of it and either urge it on or or it now the second course uh picks up in

1900 and it's called postmodern philosophy and uh uh uh the main point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers uh started to react against in a very sophisticated way much of what had happened intellectually in the in the modern era uh uh and they in some cases were radicalizing it in some cas is wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually and culturally in the modern era uh and we started to see in philosophy um a move to more skeptical relativized uh even kind of the death of philosophy the sense that philosophy

has for Millennia tried to answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a in a culminating fashion but uh from their more skeptical perspective by the time we get into the 20th century their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self realizes that it can't in fact answer any of those questions so it should in effect disintegrate so uh I'm concerned to lay out the pre postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this I here I would name people like Bertrand Russell who had a strongly skeptical phase John

Dewey and some of the pragmatist to some extent Martin haiger and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michelle Fuko jacqu dered dah who who take it but also at the same time since I don't uh I don't agree with any of them but I do give them a fair shot and we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are coming from and why these arguments are so so powerful and that we that we have to take them seriously nonetheless there have been many as I think of them philosophers who think the

earlier Traditions some sometimes the premodern more Scholastic or religious traditions still have some bite and can be repackaged for this postmodern era some who think the mo probably fallen into that camp as of late well I think to some extent yes yes so you would be an example of that others who think the enlightenment project has been a great success even though it had some philosophical errors those can be tweaked as an an ongoing scientific project and so uh I'm interested in also thinkers like Carl popper and in Rand and Philip ofoot who are not

so skeptical in fact they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition right right right and the idea at the end of that course is that we have a sense of what the philosophical uh and philosophically informed intellectual landscape looks at in in our time right bringing it right up to right up to current times and characterizing it as in effect a three-way debate between the moderns the premodern and the postmoderns and in one sense uh uh we've never lived in better times philosophically because we have self-conscious articulate and very able representatives of all of those

Traditions uh operating in our generation so bringing all of that in an eight lecture series to uh hopefully large International audience that uh can access them online so that's that's been my intellectual Mission there okay so I'd like to make a case for everybody that's watching and listening for the philosoph iCal Enterprise at a practical level mean regardless in a way regardless of whether philosophy can address the larger questions of life and I I think you have to be in some ways absurdly skeptical to assume axiomatically that the answer to that is no it's necessary

in my estimation very necessary regardless of who you are to understand the nuances of the thinkers that you describe because unbeknown to you the thoughts that you think are yours are actually theirs and so it's people might wonder you know what practical use it is to study history and one answer to that is if you understand history maybe you won't be doomed to repeat the more catastrophic elements of it but with regards to philosophy if you don't understand the thought of great philosophers you have no idea why you that you think the way you do

why you think the way you do or what the consequences of that might be right what what is the idea that we're all unconscious exponents of some dead philosopher or some combination of Dead Philosophers and so we although we don't understand it we live within not only the conceptual Universe these people have established but the perceptual universe that they've established right that they actually have shaped the way that we see the world a very profound level and so if you don't understand that then you're a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension and that

unless you want to be a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension that's not a very good plan so does that seem like a reasonable no I think that's exactly on track uh I think a lot of people uh in our era are more active minded than people were in previous eras we have more media more freedom more resources to to be able to do so but even the more active minded people I think as you are pointed out even if you are to lar extent independently coming up with ideas it nonetheless is Illuminating

many cases to realize that there has been a smart person uh who thought of that before you in many cases in a more sophisticated form and integrated that with other ideas so sometimes you can find a thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down and most of us don't have time to be active intellectuals we have our we have our full lives so uh anything that we can learn from the philosophers who thought through these issues can accelerate our process down that road and then of course the other thing is that

to the extent that you don't think about these things uh what you are saying I think is exactly right in many cases we are unconsciously guided in certain directions sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure so that all of the you know the roads and traffic lights and Lighting systems and so forth and we grow up with them and you know we're like the fish in the water we just take it for for granted that we're surrounded by these things and we have automated operating inside the certain kind of infrastructure system but at the

same time it is Illuminating to step back and think that somebody thought through every aspect of that infrastructure system and in many cases I'm being directed perhaps in ways that are not not healthy and how can we make that infrastructure system better that's going to take people who are aware that in many cases they are being guided Guided by that infrastructure so that that's a good thing to focus in on I think too at the moment and this is where we could have a discussion about postmodernism and modernism and maybe what comes next so let

me lay out a couple of propositions for you and tell me what you think about this is maybe the Nexus of what I was hoping to discuss with you so um I'll give the postmodernist Devils they due to begin with and you can tell me what what what your opinion is about that so I think that we are on the cusp of a philosophical and maybe a theological Revolution and I think it's in part because the postmodernists identified the some of the flaws in Enlightenment thinking and so the postmodernist there's a the the fundamental postmodernist

insistence as far as I can discern is that we inevitably we by necessity see the world through a story and so I've been trying to figure out what that means and it's and the large language model emergence of the large language models have helped out with that so imagine that um the and I want you to correct me if I get any of this wrong the rationalist presumption is that we do see the world through a framework the imperious presumption is that we derive our knowledge of the world from a set of in in a

sense self-evident facts that emerge in the domain of perception but there's a problem with both of those Notions is the nature of the rationalist framework isn't precisely specified and it isn't obvious at all that there's a level of self-evident fact in in fact I think the data the scientific data on the neuroscience and the engineering side indicate quite clearly that that's just not the case that you can't separate perception let's say from motivation you can't separate perception from action because all of your senses are active while they're Gathering so-called data there's no sense data and

so I've been trying to wrestle with what that means exactly because one possible interpretation of the idea that there's no base level of sense data is a descent into a nihilistic or or relativistic morass and I don't think that's a tenable solution either not least for motivational and emotional reasons I think there's a clue to the manner in which this problem be solved in the fact of the large language models so what they essentially do is establish a waiting system between conceptions and so in the large language models every word let's say is associated with

every other word at a certain level of probability so if word a appears there's a some probability that word b will come next and then if phrase a appears there's some probability that phrase B will will appear and the same with sentences and the same with paragraphs and there's literally hundreds of billions of these parameters in those models and what they've done is map out the weight of data points so you know if if there's five facts at hand and I could in principle use those facts to guide my perception or my action I still

have to solve the problem of how I would wait the facts and you might say well you don't have to wait them and I would say well no that just means you've all waited them equivalently there's no no if you have more than one thing at hand and you have to combine them in some manner you have to wait them there's no option and you can wait them all one but that's also a decision and it's arbitrary and so instead even to perceive we have to wait the facts and as far as I can tell

a story is a description of the structure that we use to waight the facts and so that doesn't mean that the facts that doesn't mean that our perceptions have no structure and that everything's subjective but it also doesn't mean that the facts speak to the for themselves like the empiricists would insist or the behaviorists for that matter you know that there's a stimulus and then there's an automatic response or something of that nature so I know that's a bit of a scattershot but but I hope you can see what I'm aiming at and I'm I

guess I'm wondering what do you think of the proposition that we see the world through a story for example hello everybody so my wife and I are going back out on tour from my new book we who wrestle with God I'm going to be walking through a variety of biblical stories now the postmodern types and the Neo marxists they think the story is one of power and that is a dangerous Story the fundamental Rock upon which true civilization is built is encapsulated in the biblical stories and so I've spent a lot of time trying to

understand them and the point of the tour and the book is to bring whatever understanding I've managed to develop to as wide an audience as [Music] possible all right already we're into heavy duty epistemology right Neuroscience right history psychology value sets including motivation issues and so on okay so right just hold on to that for a moment right so I'm going to say you're right traditional empiricism has had problems traditional rationalism has had problems and that we cannot accept in uh post analysis sort out all of the elements and that's a big part of what

the scientific project goes on but let me start by defending the empiricist for a moment so what I just did on the table Yeah right shocking was that Johnson who kicked the stone okay uh ge Moore Moore okay yeah that's and but also yeah earlier in when he was talking about the I refute you thus isn't that that's right which is is it's in the right track but still still too naive okay but just reflect on that experience if we start to to try to defend the empiricist for a moment so I smacked the table

completely out of the blue but for anybody who's listening right or watching that was sense data you had no motivational set you had no story in mind uh uh you had no behavioral preconditions to set for you there was an experience and you were aware of the experience now what you then go on to do with that experience is going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing and all of the things that you are laying out are exactly right so the empiricist commitment I think if it's going to be properly done has to be that there

are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that ultimately when we get all of the other things sorted out and sometimes we have to do this in Laboratories where we isolated all of the variables there is a residual direct contact with empirical reality something that's out the test no but even there the language becomes very important because we don't want to say that it's subjective at least as philosophers use the term because that then is to say it's not in relationship to what is out there so uh again

we have to get into the technical epistemology very carefully when philosophers talk about the subjective sometimes they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side but if we were doing epistemology or knowledge then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is is set by the subject and the external reality has nothing to do with it the opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it in said just reality smacks

that person in the face and as you put it uh the story doesn't need to be told it wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is what I think H the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those so we have to understand Consciousness as a response mechanism to reality it's an inherently relational phenomenon and you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality what very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think well if the subject is involved D

then there's no way for us to be aware of reality they Retreat to some sort of representationalist model or they start going internal and then they start talking about motivations and Theory Laden and other beliefs that you have and once you make that divide there is no way to get out subject out of the subject and back to reality on the other hand if you try to react to that and say the subject has can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge then you try as

desperately as you can to erase the subject right to pretend the subject doesn't exist to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject but that also is an impossible model so what I want to say is the empiricist commitment and historically the empiricists have struggled to work with work this out this is this is the ongoing project uh uh in the early modern era I think they had very weak uh accounts of sense perception and

that was part of the part of the big problem and I think as you rightly pointed out postmodernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those those very early those very early models so what I would just say is the first project for emperis is is to uh argue that there is a residual right base level contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how sophisticated it it it it starts but that as an epistemological claim has to work

with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind you can't do the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of Neuroscience some sort of understanding of psychology the relation of the mind to the body and both of them to to uh to to the other uh to to to reality rather and I think the the important Point here is to see Consciousness as a relational phenomenon and that's a philosophy of Mind claim it's not just let me just say it's not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality it's not a pre-existing entity that has its own

nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself it's a response mechanism and all of these other things have to come out of that let me just say one more thing I think we talk a lot about epistemology and olical concerns really have dominated modern philosophy modern psychology the modern scientific project and I think that's that's fine to Define that for people epistemology the theory of knowledge so we try to figure out uh so theology part is to give an account of something or an explanation of in this case it's the Greek

word epistem right for for knowledge when do I really know something we have all kinds of beliefs kicking around where the difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and falsehood that's right and just having been condition to do certain things so how do I really know that I know something and when should I say that I don't really know something and developing self-consciously what the standards are for for good knowledge and this involves some reflection on sense perception as we're starting to talk about now a good understanding of language and grammar logic and then when

we start talking about stories and we say stories uh do in some sense inform us and we can can really learn about the world through through story what's the place of narrative in a in a proper epistemological framework so we've been thinking through those things very uh very systematically now that though uh uh is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge all of that language is epistemological but I think uh we can't do epistemology in isolation we always have to do

it in context with metaphysics that is to say we have to also be talking about the nature of reality so we want to ontological question that's right yeah what what's the furniture of the universe so to speak what's what's real and what isn't real and then the question so the question is anytime I want to say you know this is true or this is real there this a fact right or whatever that's to make a claim about reality and then the follow-up que always claim always is well how do you know that so you're making

the claim but you're also making a justificatory claim so reality or and then broadly speaking when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole then we are doing metaphysics you the special Sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology but if we can step back and say are for example space and time features of the universe as a whole is the universe Eternal or infinite in various Dimensions does a God exist or not uh those are all metaphysical metaphysical questions so to come back to this is just the one

more point that I want to make is that all of the things that we talk about when we start talking about sense perception and forming Concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind that is to say what is this thing that we call the mind and one of the things that early modern philosophy now this is 1400s 1500s on into the 1600s was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being and if uh for example you have what was

common for many centuries I say a dualistic understanding of the human being that the human being is a body but also a soul or or a physicality plus a spiritual element and that these are two very different metaphysical things right one is subject to corruption and the other is in in principle Eternal uh and that they have you know different ontological makeups different agendas different ultimate Destinies then on the metaphysics side you know how do those two come together how do they work together how do they fit together what's the proper understanding of of those

two but that metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go so if you are say an empiricist uh and you want to say well we start in say the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other but somehow I have to get that across this metaphysical Gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind which I think of as being on the spirit side of things

or on the soul side of things can confront it and then do various things that we that we uh we think we're going to do with our with our minds our reason and our emotions and so forth and that metaphysical Gulf if you can can't bridge that Gulf metaphysically uh is going to cause you problems epistemologically and so one reason why we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later I think is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems the early rationalist theories had problems various attempts to overcome them like

Kant led to problems and so forth it wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led it to dead ends but at the same time we were struggling with the metaphysical problem as I'm thinking of it the Mind Body problem and once we said uh or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas or non-physical realities or stories are non-physical realities and they're in a mind and we're conceiving conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world as a non-physical world it's a very difficult to try to find how

that then relates back to that physical world so I would say in your field for example where you come out of Professional Psychology it's interesting that Professional Psychology only came on board in the late 1800s uh and so we say you know this is the my potted history of your your discipline we have the early freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900 and one of the things that they're both trying to do is to say well finally we can start to study the mind scientifically we can have a science of the

mind but what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the Mind somehow didn't fit into nature it was an extra natural thing it was a a ghost in the machine and the the fitting of the ghost in the machine we don't have a theory that that that works this out and both of them uh were of course reflecting on Darwin and Darwin's more robust ly naturalistic understanding of the human being that we're going to see the mind not as a ghost that's in the wet wear or in the biological

wear but as a some sort of emergent phenomenon or a bipod but it's only when we stop thinking about uh uh the human being as a ghost plus a machine to use that metaphor or a spirit plus a body as two different things as much more of a naturalist integrit then we start to think that we can do SCI psychology science ific Al now the 4ans and the behaviorists I think they were both disasters in various ways they were genius but they you know this is again the early steps of science but what they are

starting to do though is say we're not going to study the human being uh we are going to study the human being as part of the natural world and but notice that this is now into the 1900s and psychology is a very new science and this is already 30 00 years after modern philosophy had been taken over in a sense by the epistemologist and had worked their way into a very skeptical form so my hope is uh if we're talking about where the future has to go know psychology has been online for a century now

a little more than a century now extraordinarily complex stuff as as we all know but we we're making progress there but I think it's still early days and what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology it has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition the best from the rationalist tradition and and so on so that's my uh summary story of how we ended up where where we are and why I'm not and why I'm not a thoroughgoing skeptic on on any of these issues I

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or visit pre-born docomo pre-born maintains a fourstar charity rating and all gifts are tax deductible join us in supporting this crucial work visit preborn docomo today I think the people that we've brought together on Peterson Academy too are at the Forefront of that attempt to integrate and so that's one of our you might say one of our educational themes as we move forward is to continue that investigation John Veri I would say is somebody who's on the Forefront that on the psychological and Neuroscience side so let's go back to your demonstration of primary sensory input

right just hitting the table so I'll outline a neuroscience approach to that so you know you might think that you perceive and then you evaluate and then you think and then you act and that's like the causal chain but none of that's exactly correct because even when you're responding to a primary stimulus like that so to speak there's a hierarchy of neurological responses that are operating more or less simultaneously now I'd say more or less because you do have reflexive action so I think the simplest way to understand this is to assume that what you're

detecting as a consequence of the slap that you delivered to the table is a patterned waveform okay so let me just interrupt are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it because I I came in with a pre-intentional so at one level of analysis it's the St the same stimulus let's say in so far as it's an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a with a phone recorder or something like that but then as you said the fact that you come to that experience with different expectations colors it

and so there is a way to think about that I think the best way to to start to understand it is to think about the pattern so there's a waveform pattern that propagates in the in the air which is the delivery system obviously for the stimulus and then there's an auditory pattern now when your nervous system receives that pattern it doesn't go to one point place and then another place and then another place and then another place in a linear progression there's some of that but what happens is that the pattern is assessed simultaneously by

a multiple different levels of the nervous system right so the most primary level would be spinal and there are very few connections between the auditory system and the spinal response system and so for example if I was on edge or uncertain about you or about this circumstance and you hit the table in that manner unexpectedly one probable outcome is a startle reflex and a startle reflex is a variant of a predator response it's it's of a response to predation and it's basically auditory signal onto spinal cord mapping and the initial phase of the startle response

is you could say it's preconscious and it's pre- emotional and the reason it's pre is because the time it takes for the signal to propagate onto the spinal receptors is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to propagate even to the emotions and you need that so for example if you're walking down a pathway and out of the periphery of your eye you detect a snake and you have really good snake detectors especially in the periphery in the bottom part of your vision in the top part by the way cuz there are more

snakes on the ground than there are in trees if you take the time to move your eyes the center of your eyes so that you can see the snake and then you evaluate the snake emotionally by the time you've done that the snake's already bitten you it's too it's too long a Time whereas if you use these peripheral dis receptors that map right onto your spine you can jump before the snake strikes hopefully cats can do it by the way about 10 times as fast well we're pretty good too as it turns yeah but not

as fast as cats but fast to often escape from sakes and so you get this this first LEL response that's almost entirely reflexive that's what the early behaviorists were discovering too when they were talking about stimulus response like there are somewhat automatic response systems that are very primordial and basic that do almost a onetoone mapping of sensory pattern onto behavioral output very few in very few neural interconnections and the disadvantage to that is that it's a rather fixed response pattern and the advantage of is it's super fast okay so now the same pattern propagates up

so imagine the pattern propagates down on your spine and you can react very quickly another part of it propagates into the auditory cortex or the visual cortex and that's what you see with and those are actually dissociable so there are people who have a phenomenon called condition called Blindside so if you ask these people if they can see they tell you no but they still respond well if you hold up your hand for example they can guess with more than 90% accuracy which hand is up and it seems to be because there's it's their visual

cortex that's damaged and not their retina and a lot of the vision Pathways into the brain are still intact but not the one that mediates conscious Vision which is dependent on the visual cortex right but they still have kinetic perception with their eyes so one of the things I'm doing when I watch you is that I'm picking up where your body is located and I'm mapping that onto my body and so if I'm seeing you with blind sight with your hand up like this I'll have a sensation in my body that corresponds to your body

position and I can read off that so it's not exactly Vision because I'm not seeing you but it is a form of vision and it's even more sophisticated than that so if you take these people with Blindside and you show them faces that are angry or afraid and you assess their galvanic skin response which is a change in sweating basically that's associated with emotional arousal they'll respond differentially to emotional faces even though they don't know that that's blindsight that's part of Blindside and so when you hear or see something that pattern is being assessed at

multiple levels of a very complex hierarchy and it's not just bottom up because those that hierarchy also feeds backwards so for example by the time you're an adult most of what you see is memory you just use the sensory input as a hint to pull up the memory that's also how you get habituated to things you know when you see something for the first time it's got this glow of novelty this numinous glow of novelty and what happens is that you and that's complex and difficult to process and then as you become accustomed to it

and you build an internal mental model you replace the perception with memory because that's faster the problem is is that the memory that you see is only the fractional meaning of the phenomena that's relevant to the encounters that you had it it shuts everything off and it de what would you say it takes the magic out of the world as you replace raw perception with memory you take the magic out of the world that's a reasonable way of thinking about it that's why there's a novelty kick for example and so the reason I'm bringing this

up is because even that relatively straightforward demonstration that you made that sound that that seems self-evident It's you said right off the bat that there was a level at which both of us experienced that quite differently you experienced it differently because you knew you were going to do it it came as a surprise to me that surprise was moderated by the fact that I know you I know your profession I know your professional status I know the purpose of what we're doing here yeah I know the probability that what I know about you indicates that

you would do something that was surprising or dangerous which is very very low so even though it was unexpected it's bounded in its significance by all of that knowledge and you might say well that's independent of the sense data but it's not like that's a very tricky thing to establish right to get that Independence to to figure out well what's raw sense data and what's the interpretation it gets worse than this you can train dogs to wag their tail when they receive an electric shock they're happy about it and and So You Think electric shock

that's pretty basic sense that it's like yeah yes and no if you reliably pair a shock now it depends on the magnitude of the shock obviously so there are some boundaries around this but you can train a dog to be excited about the re of an electrical shock if you reliably pair it with a food reward because the a priori significance of the electric shock might be pain response right indicative of the potential for physiological damage because that's approximately what pain is but if you associate it with the receipt of a reward then it takes

on a dopaminergic cast which means that the shock becomes indicative of the receipt of a reward and that's a positive emotion phenomena and it can override the shock it's also the case that if you take animals like rats that are pretty intelligent and you put them in a cage they'll deliver electric shocks to themselves randomly just because they're bored and so they'll and horses will do that as well now as as as I said it's magnitude depend hum too yeah yes well of course people do that people are do that par excellance and so all

of these it's very difficult to specify a level of analysis where there isn't an interpretive framework simultaneously active as the raw sense data makes itself manifest now I mean your demonstration was very what would you say it cut right to the chase because a sound like that is you might say is not subject to an infinite number of interpretations right there's something there but it's always nested it seems to be that it's nested in a hierarchy of interpretations a very high level hierarchy of interpretations let me say I all of that is great all of

it is beautiful all of that is directly relevant so to tie that back into what our philosophical intellectual predicament is now if we want to say right postmodernism as a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as an active ongoing project that we're learning more and more that's going to give us a better and better EP emology um I all of that that that is great so I'm a kind of empiricist but what I would say is that everything that you have said was in the early days of empiricism not

known to any of the empiricists so in many cases they had very crude understandings of what memory would be what reflex would be emotions would be yeah perception right and so forth and so uh uh so naturally then makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a at at a basic level but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas and their theories are faulty and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say well

empiricism is a is a failed project instead of seeing it as an ongoing project the other thing I would say or actually there's two other things one is you know as you described uh the process you you say out there there's the slap there are sound waves we are making realist claims the really was a slap there really are structured energy patterns and we really do have in our ears or or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy energy patterns and all of

that we are making reality claims and we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the the the physiological system of the human being some of them as you say are Opera in parallel they have feedback loops right and and so forth I think uh I'm a very minimal empiricist on this is to say that empiricism only insists that there really is a reality there well there is a reality and it has these patterns that we are not making up those patterns and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality instead what

we call our sensory receptors is you know array of cells that if there are certain structures in reality they will respond but they're not making up those structures in reality so my nose for example has no at least sometimes they're not making okay but the sometimes comes later yeah okay and we can come to that so so my nose for example has all kinds of chemical structures out there it doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead rotting things right it's just that if I happen to encounter dead rotting things

then certain chemicals will be W and then my my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way that's an important whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality uh and that takes you down the skep particularly good example versus saying that uh that the structures are there and what we have are just latent reception structures that if those structures happen to be present will be responsive and that thing is all that the the uh the the empiricists are saying now the other all

of the other stuff where we say okay uh the background set I came to the slap with a background set you came to with a with a different background set we start to say what all goes into that background set that's where philosophy starts to become well no that's well I think that's where philosophy is is important and we can as philosophers I think articulate well we have reason we have emotions we have memory and there is something that physiologically goes on uh you know I I have a body and it's all worked out and

that it's going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties uh but I think at a very general level and I think the philosophers have to work hand inand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologist because and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy it's not a very strong complaint but that they uh they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience and 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology so it's a lot of failed experiments right along the way or failed theories

along the way the other thing though I would want to say is as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of of the Mind both epistemologically and metaphysically is that we stop turning uh virtues into vices as I as I think of it so to say for example you know that we have and then you you talk about the base level you know that the slap happens or you there something moves low to the ground and there's a direct automated something that you didn't think about didn't feel about connection

to the spine and your body reacts in a in a certain way uh I want to say that's a good thing that has happened to human being that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli rather than turning that into a vice right or a bad thing and seeing that is oh well if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity that we're not really responding to reality and so forth or if we say we have emotions which we

do have emotions and I think emotions are positive they certain certainly an important role in our evaluative structure figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life and we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way let them use us instead of using them so emotions come with pitfalls but rather than as many early epistemologies have done it said well we have emotions and emotions are on the subject side of things so the enemy of reason that's right and so yeah that's so they're irrational and we turn something that is

a very valuable uh uh tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology you you see that a little bit with attention men who still believe in the American dream in a world gone mad the Precision five from Jeremy's Razer stands as a beacon of Sanity five Blades of superior engineering offer a shave as unshakable is your faith that the nation's best days still lie ahead experience an exceptionally smooth remarkably close shave and a testament to the fact that Merit still matters stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you get Jeremy risers

Precision 5 instead available now at Jeremy rers.us psychologists who claim that because we evolved for a substantial period of time on the African plains that our emotional motivational systems are no longer properly adapted to the modern world it's like I find that that's a a variant of the argument that you just laid out and that it it is it also has the Echoes of that rationalist some variants of rationalism that Proclamation that emotion is the enemy of reason it's like emotions are unbelievably sophisticated they're low resolution and they're quick they're not as quick as say

spinal reflexes but they're faster than thought and they're also broader than thought and they also enable us to evaluate when we don't have enough information to think and they they have their pitfalls like everything human because nothing human is omniscient and so we're going to make errors but the idea that there's a fundamental antipathy between the emotional the ID let's say in the ego right that because that's a variant of that psychoanalytic theory that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nervous system is integrated okay so okay so so let let me run something

else by you since we've laid out this I want to run a proposition by you and it's sort of a variant of the meme theory although it takes into account the idea that so-called memes abstractions compete across historical and evolutionary times so imagine this so this is memes the Jordan sorry in the yeah so imagine that there is this level of sensory input that is as close to corresponding with objective reality as as we can manage and then imagine that that's interpreted within this hierarchical framework that we described levels of abstraction that ra rise up

to in ineffability essentially that would be something like the meaning of the fact that you hit the table in this particular context right okay so now imagine you've got this imagine that every level of that hierarchy and the totality of the hierarchy competes across evolutionary time so one way of grounding our thinking in data is to assume that all of what we know emerges from raw sense data but there's another way of thinking about it which is that the data is interpreted within a hierarchical framework that's full of feedback loops right and there's variant forms

of those those upper level hierarchies but those forms compete across time and only and the more successfully they compete across time the more they become instantiated physiologically there's that's a Baldwin effect selection mechanism the higher order interpretive structures that produce the best reproductive outcome across time are more likely to become automated at a instinctual level emotions would be like that like they're not as automatized as spinal reflexes but they're quite automatized because the sets of emotions that human beings have are very similar anger fear surprise Joy Etc everyone feels those when and where is different

but the fact of the emotions is the same so then imagine that this is something like the domain of iterable and playable games so imagine that there's a variety of different interpretive Frameworks that we lay upon more basic sensory data but that a relatively small subset of those interpretive Frameworks has the capacity for sustainable Improvement so you could think about this think about this in the context let's say of a marital relationship right there's a very large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong like an indefinite number of ways that your marriage can

go wrong but then there's a constrained number of ways that it will go right and that's because it's it's a difficult Target imagine that the specifications are something like for your marriage to be successful the micro routines and the macro routines have to be such that you're voluntarily okay with them and your wife is voluntarily okay with them and they bond you more tightly together across time and and this would be the optimal situation as you lay them out together they improve okay and so you could imagine that as the basis for an optimized contractual

relationship of any form but then you could also imagine that the number of variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those conditions to be met would be low there's a there's a very small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across large spans of time that improve as you play them okay so then you'd get an evolutionary pressure as well on the philos on the domains of possible philosophy right that they'd fill up something like a space and that seems to me to be reflective it's weird because that's

also reflective of an empirical reality but it's not it's not the reality that's associated with basic sense data it's more the fact that there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary playable and that improve and that's Al a fact right I mean and and that would be I think that's partly why there are patterns of Ethics that tend to emerge in many different cultures even independently right it's it's and that also makes a mockery in some ways of a really radical relativism it's like it's not the the value space the philosophical space

isn't relativistic because there's a finite number of interpretive Frameworks that actually have anything approximating productive staying power and that is reflective of something like the structure of reality it's more sophisticated reflection than the basic sense data and so see I'm I I'm I'm saying this because I'm trying to mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world through a narrative which I think I think that's true I think all the Neuroscience dat and points in that direction and then you might say well any old Story Goes that it's like no just because we see

the world through a story doesn't mean that the stories themselves aren't constrained by empirical reality and its most sophisticated sense and it also doesn't mean that the stories even though their stories fail to correspond to reality that's extraordinarily Rich everything that you're laying out there let me just uh start with one thread to pull I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative um I understand the attraction of it make a more technical description no no no no if we just start with that formulation I think that is I think

that's a dangerous formulation I do think the postmoderns are on board with that but notice what it says it say there's a we there's a me and then there's a narrative and then there's reality out there and that I have to go through this narrative get to real like a screen that's right and it might it might be know it might have some Shanks in it it might be opaque right but also what this narrative is is has got a huge amount of stuff built into it right all kinds of background expectations and theories and

uh slippery terms right and and so forth what I would say is to use this language is that narratives are things that we use to see reality if the narrative is true so sometimes narratives get reality right sometimes narratives are wildly on basis yeah that's in keeping with this idea of competition across time okay that's for sure but rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary it itself is a tool it's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in when we are relating to reality that's if we

get it right okay but if we mess it up then it does become something that we try to see reality through and we are we're in a problematic situation okay so let let me reformulate the description okay and then let's see if that rectifies that problem and then let's see where we can go with that problem because I'll object to your objection and see where that goes so I would say a narrative is a description of the structure through which we see the world right that's a different claim so so because it's not a narrative

until I tell it to but then you've dropped reality out of the picture well that that's exactly why I want to have this discussion because I don't I don't want it I think it's very dangerous it's kind of obvious to drop reality out of the situation but you're you're right that the danger of the postmodern formulation is which is that we see the world through a narrative let's say is exactly that is that the reality drops out of the equation there's nothing but the text let's say like if there's a competition between narratives for their

functionality let's say reproductive and otherwise that would go some way to addressing that problem because there'd be a darwinian competition between narrative structures that would prioritize some over others and so but the description part that the idea that it's a description is relevant so imagine that wolves in OPAC at a perceptual level the Wolves distinguish the rank order of the wolf that they're seeing they do that extremely rapidly highly social animal are unbelievably good at that and so the story of the dominance the story of the hierarchy of the Wolves is implicit in the perception

of the wolves and if you describe that it's a story but it's not a story before it's described it's whatever a story is before it's described it it seems to me like it's something like the weights in a neural network returning to that idea is that there are certain facts let's say that present themselves to us that are much more heavily weighted and that's axiomatic it's built into the system and those would be facts for imagine that evoke emotional response very rapidly they're weighted and that waiting has a biological element and a cultural element now

that's not a story but if you describe that that's what a story is the scientist who's studying the Wolves is creating a story con no not cre I want to say constructing a story yes or it's a story about something that's not happening mediated through stories in the Wolves yes right in for the Wolves it's a pattern of behavior and a pattern of perception it's not a so so imagine this is when when you go to see a movie you take on the waiting the value structure of the protagonist now human beings are very good

at that like we look at each other's eyes and we see what people are attending to and we watch their patterns of attention and we in their valuation and their motivation we're unbelievably good at that and that's what you're doing when you're going to a movie we we watch how the protagonist prioritizes his attention and his action what his priorities are and you infer from that the perceptual structure that well that's the question does it bring some facts to light and make others irrelevant and if so is it a screen like most of the world

we don't see most of the world is screened out from our perception some of that's biomechanical I can't see behind my head but some of it is I'm looking at you so I can't see the faces of the cameraman right now right so that's a that's a choice that's dependent on my determination of how to focus my attention now the fact that I'm prioritizing you I can see your face I'm using the fial center of my vision and I can't see these guys because they're in my periphery that's kind of like a screen right the

place where it's most open is the central point of vision over here it's obscured and over here it's just gone completely so now you you objected to my characterization because you said you know Observer screen reality and you didn't like the proposition of the intermed intermediary screen and I know the screening idea isn't exactly right but on the counter side we have this problem some things are Central to our perception and other things are peripheral and that's dependent on our values and our patterns of attention and our actions so well I'm curious about what you

think about that well I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the T they're going to be related I think the first one where we are looking at a human being say an actor on a screen right putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sort read the world I think that's very extraordinarily complicated um and I think the interesting thing there is going to be while you say that we humans are very good at that uh the interesting is going to be how much of that is learned uh because it does

seem to be a highly fallible process because I I know I just don't want to get too personal here but there will be lots of times I've been in Social circumstances and I think I'm pretty Savvy about reading people but I'll be with my uh with my wife and she will say after we've had a conversation with someone Bo did you notice how you know upset that person was about blah blah blah women and their interpersonal perception okay that so there may be you know sex gender differences that are going on but also at the

same it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that so when we say people are very good at that I think that's true but we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that I think that's going to be a very very sophisticated story but then the other example uh takes us back to perceptual cases where you're talking about are you looking at me or me looking at you and we're also aware that we're in a room that there are other people in

the room who are filling and so on but getting right down to issues of if I choose to focus right on one thing then it is true that everything else goes pales by comparison yeah that's right and pales is metaphorical so uh if if we're not if we're going to try to then unpack the the metaphor I think we would say we focus and unfocus and then we can give descriptors of what the state of unfocus is and what the state of state of focus is and I would prefer using that language to the language

of screen because screen really is something that is is in the way it's it's it's a thing itself that is a that's another obstacle right so if you know if there's a dressing screen between the two of us and I'm undressing for privacy right the whole idea of the screen is that it that it's blocking right so the metaphor is too simple that sorry that would be different from uh I think a better metaphor would be to say to filter and I think sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter they're just attending to some

things and not attending to to other things but a filter is different from a screen and also but also just to stay on this one issue here the issue of focus and unfocus I think is not it's not a filter either are you tired of feeling sluggish run down or just not your best self take control of your health and vitality today with balance B of nature with balance of nature there's never been a more convenient dietary supplement to ensure you get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day balance of nature takes fruits

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get a free bottle of fiber and spice that's balance nature.com promo code Jordan for 35% off your first preferred order plus a free bottle of fiber and spice I have a metaphor for you tell me what you think about this well I've been thinking about this a lot because I've been studying Old Testament stories and uh I think the Tabernacle in the old Old Testament is a model of perception H okay so tell me what you think of this as a analogy better than screen and better than filter okay remind me what element of the

Tabernacle will I'll lay it out okay so the Tabernacle at the center of the Tabernacle is the Ark of the Covenant right so there's a center point and it's sacred okay and if I remember correctly in the early ceremonies that were associated with the Tabernacle the high priest was only allowed to go into the holy of holies the center once a year so there's a center then there's a structure of veils around it like so that there's a center and then it's veiled and then outside of that is another Veil and then outside of that

is another Veil and then outside of that is another Veil and then outside of that is the community and so that's the sacred central point of the community and the Center is the what would you say the point of focus the fundamental point of focus and then the significance of the periphery is proportional to the distance from the center now the reason there's a there's a variety of reasons that I think this is the right metaphor it's partly because so it say a metaphor for what for for for object perception for any perception for any

perception it's so and here's partly why so I was referring to the visual system for example so the way your visual system is constructed is that at the very center every cell in the center of your vision is connected to 10,000 neurons at the fundamental level of analysis okay and then each of those 10,000 is associated with 10,000 it spirals up exponentially very rapidly but the fial tissue in the center of your vision is very high cost it takes a lot of neural tissue to process it and it takes a lot of energy a lot

if if your whole retina was fovial your head would be like alien cells um Eagles have two phobia by the way they have extremely sharp vision and so now you're you're because high resolution vision is expensive you can move your eyes and you Dart this very high resolution center around and so every time you move your eyes and you do that unconsciously because they're always vibrating and consciously because you can move them and in consequence of emotion as well so if you hear a noise off to the side and it startles you you'll look and

that's unconscious lots of things direct your visual attention but everything you look at has a center dead center where everything is extremely high resolution and then it's surrounded by lesser and lesser spheres of resolution until at the periphery there's nothing right okay so like out here if I just hold my hand steady I can't see it except as a blur if I move it I can see the fingers so out here I can detect movement that's how dinosaurs saw by the way dinosaurs frogs still they can't see anything that isn't moving they have Vision like

our periphery so out here be because the tissue in the periphery of my vision isn't very highly inovated I prioritize movement because my assumption is if it isn't moving I don't have to pay attention to it you know it's it's a default assumption about what's ignor a dynamical environment yeah right exactly and so if you're going to prioritize peripheral vision the priority is If It Moves look at it otherwise ignore it yeah okay so every perception has a center and then a gradation of resolution until it fades out into nothing yeah and and that Tabernacle

as as far as I can tell is a model of the perceptual center it's a model of the community center as well but it's a model of perception as such so that's different that's different than the screen obviously and well you do have these veils that you constru that's true that's true that's true and it's you see and The Veil The Veil Ida is an interesting one because the the perceptions we have in the periphery are nowhere near as intense as the perceptions that we have in the center and so these perceptions one way of

thinking about them is these perceptions peripheral perceptions are veiled out here behind me they're veiled so intensely you can't even see them but the veils are graduate so it's it's well so you tell me what you think about that yeah let me try a different I don't want to use the Tabernacle example I'm not as familiar with it but suppose you think of the difference between a place say you're walking through this is an example I heard from another philosopher you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood right at night and you think it's a slightly dangerous

neighborhood right and so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can yeah and so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field it's a a magnetic field or electric field like that idea yes that's right uh and in that case what I'm trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular uh like I might when I'm reading so then I'm using my visual attention I'm focusing on this particular thing or I'm an artist and I'm trying to catch the do the glint

on the eyeball for the for the finishing cut so my eyes are wide open and I am and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field but that I think is coextensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works as if I am in the bad neighborhood at night and what I tried to do is just expand my attention to Encompass this whole field so that if anything moves in that entire field then I can zoom okay so that's a good that's a good objection that's a good objection

I guess I I could make that initial analogy more sophisticated because I would say then that the Tabernacle structure Center and periphery is characteristic of explored and familiar territory you're making a case that there's a different perceptual mode in unexplored territory and there is so birds have a prey eye and a predator eye and the Predator eye acts like the painter that you described who's focusing on one thing because he's zero in on the thing you're after the the I'm prei so that would be the bird's the other IE is scanning in exactly the way

that you described deprioritizing the center amplifying the input from the periphery because yeah and that's that maps onto the hemispheres so the left hemisphere does the perceptual mapping that you Des this is in right-handed people the left hemisphere does the focal perception that you describe that's detail oriented and that de prioritizes the periphery and the right hemisphere does the opposite and and you know that's that's I suppose you could say at a biological level that's because it's eat or be eaten right in the most Primal possible way and so there's a perceptual system for things

you're going to eat and there's a perceptual system for you might be on the menu yeah ex right right and and yeah so that's okay see the thing that's so curious about that and that you just highlighted is that the Ceremonies for taking possession of a territory that are anthropologically specified it's usually driving a stake or a central point a flag a standard a staff into the ground that signifies Camp right or it signifies the possession of that territory that establishes a center with a set of peripheries and with forness at the you know at

the at the edge of the periphery and that does establish a certain kind of perception that's associated with security so the Tabernacle style of perception would be the perception that's associated with explored territory that's exactly right that's that's the perception of order like order is where the things you want are happening that's a good way of defining Order and Chaos is where you don't know what will happen when you act and there are two different perceptual mechanisms for those and so the the second one the danger one The Unexplained one the foreign territory one is

there's less filtering and there's less specification of Center because you don't know what's important right you're walking through that dangerous neighborhood it's like you're on alert and you don't know what's insignificant that's part of being on alert so there's no identifiable Center and that's a high stress situation yeah yeah okay okay now where I think it immediately gets more complicated and you psychologists know more about this than than I do is even if we stay with those examples um the question about what happens automatically and what is under our tional control is another dimension that

has to cut across even if we grant that in both cases whether I'm focused or whether I'm diffused attention I'm aware of reality in some direct direct sense it is true that if uh in either of those cases if I'm the artist focusing on the particular Dot and my child suddenly screams right then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go go to attend to attend yeah that's been quite mapped neurophysiologic right the Russians did a very good job of that starting in about 1960 sakov was one of them and woman named Vin

grova and and L they were students of a neuropsychologist named Lura they mapped out what they described as the orienting reflex and that's exactly what that is it's like you're focused on a task and something of pragmatic import yeah yeah of of of implicit significance dist distracts you from your goal and you do you so there's a hierarchy of gradated responses that are part of that orienting reflex but then even I think another interesting case would be you're you're the artist and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams but you've given yourself

a signal you know I'm angry at my kid right now he's been a brat I'm going to ignore him when he screams so I'm focusing exact same scenario kid screams I register it while my reaction is quite different I Stay Focus that shows you how malleable even though relatively lowlevel instinctual responses are that's going to be a back feed Loop yeah exactly exactly well that's and that's part of the consequence of the higher order brain centers feeding like there isn't a primary level of perception that has no top- down modification it's even the the primary

visual cortex say where your fobia meets the visual cortex for the first time is tremendously innervated by multiple well so here's example so when you look at a object when you look at a pen for example let's say that constitutes a visual pattern it's it's represented on the retina as a pattern it's propagated along the nerves then it branches out one of the places that information ends up quite quickly is the motor cortex so when you see almost all the objects that you see in the world you see because they're definable in terms of the

action you take in their presence so like when you see this pen the grip motion that you would use to use it is directly disinhibited by the sight of the pen and that's part of the perception it's not like you see the pen and think about its use that isn't how it works at all you see its use directly and so that's another thing that's very strange about object perceptions like you don't actually see objects in the world what you see are tools and obstacles and well then there's all the things you don't see and

the tools and obstacles are defined in relationship to your goal so you know your goal for example the one the example you used is you're not happy with your child so the goal there has shifted from respond to distress cries it's shifted from that which might be the default right to certain probability that distress cry is false right or manipulative therefore ignore very different inter interpretive framework very different social landscape and capable of modifying even the almost the base level perception you'll still hear the cry I mean I guess that would be even curious is

like if your child is it's highly probable if your child is likely to emit distress calls that are false my suspicions are you'd be less likely to hear that to actually hear it not only not to respond to it right because you'd have built an inhibitory structure that says well despite the EV the instinctual significance of that it's irrelevant yeah right right highly likely yeah to come back to like your pen example and the the issue of as sophisticated cognizers when we are perceiving the world that we have their use function kind of built into

the perception yeah I'm going to put that in quotation marks right now y right and then the uh the action that's going to uh be embodied in that use also in many cases seems to be built into the perception I think uh if we unpack that more there's still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what uh is built into the physiological system and the psychological system right at Birth and how much of it is learned because I don't think definitely yeah because I don't think we want to

say that you know in the 21st century where we come into the world born with uh kind of a precognized understanding of pens right and how to use probably have a precognized understanding of tool I don't even know if we have that instead I think we just we have a certain physiological structure that and and and a certain conceptual structure that's built on that such that and it's going to be very flexible uh and and aable to different Environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things whatever their intrinsic properties as potential tools yeah well

a lot of that so let me just just to try another example to get to uh because I like the the the earlier movie example and the male female difference one thing that comes up in couples is how they learn to be tuned to each other's voices and the sound of their own voice so couples uh who before they met each other would go to a loud party they would be talking to each other yeah that's a really good example yeah that's right and uh you know there's just there's just noise and it's it's a

big deciel level right but then once they become couples and they have heard each other say their name I say Jordan Sten right or whatever they can be in a relatively loud party separated across the room right and the guy's wife says Stephen right and he can pick that out of that incredible ex restro of sounds well that's what you do if you're in a restaurant that's bustling with coners what's so remarkable is if you're sitting with someone and and there's conversations everywhere you can tune yourself so that you hear the person that you're sitting

beside you hear them but then you can turn your attention to a conversation beside you and it'll prioritize that or you can turn your attention to your own thoughts right and it is this and I would say that's something like the imposition of that Tabernacle like structure on that on that M plethora of potential interpretations that's what the postmodernists would point out there's an infinite number of potential interpretations in a restaurant that's bustling with conversation it's like fair enough but you prioritize one that's what it means to pay attention to it right is that you

prioritize it you make something a center you make everything else a periphery then you learn to do that automatically right if with practice I think we maybe the best example of that for literate people is the fact that you can't see a word without reading it right yeah because you've automated certain that's right you've automated exactly so that that centers now what the what the postmoderns do right is that they take what I think is a virtue right that we can automate all of these things and we can learn to detect various things and focus

on this that and the other thing all of which are great strengths of the human consciousness and they turn them into negatives they turn them into vices so what they say is Right an interpretation then becomes in their language because they've already got a an epistemological Theory a negative epistemological Theory as something that is necessarily subjective and the idea for them then is that somehow if we were going to be actually aware of reality and not through this interpretation we would have to not have any interpretations at all that somehow reality would just have to

stamp itself on our on our minds without any any intermediary actions or what they will then do is to say you I can choose to prioritize this right over that in my visual field they will say and and they're right to say this that's a value judgment I think this is more important now and this is more important over that but then by the time they start using the words value they're coming out of very sophisticated negative valuative theor that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of maybe it's

worse than that so for both of them it's on the cognition side and on the evaluative side that they're deep into subjective territory and so uh those then become negative words for them instead I think and this is is my only hope as a philosopher I think philosophers have a very small part of this project just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition right all these metaphors of screens and filters and Tabernacles and yeah visual fields and so on that's where we have to get that sorted out because we don't

get those foundations correct then we're going to be we're going to be going to be messed up but yeah come back okay well so two two things there you so you pointed to the fact that the postmodernist description of the subjective but tell me tell me what you think about this see the postmodern insistence despite the fact that they claim that there's no uniting meta narrative which is a specious claim in my estimation because I don't know where the uniting ends if everything's a narrative there's uniting narratives at every level of analysis but more than

than that they their their proposition at least implicitly has been that the narratives that we do utilize are predicated on power that's part of the reflection of the subjective it's like I'm prioritizing in keeping with my desire to exercise power and by power I don't mean ability to maneuver in the world I mean force and compulsion and that what we have in the postmodern world is a Battleground between different claims of power and that's all there is I I think the weakness in that first one weakness is that it's a confession rather than a description

but but the other one is that power games are not iterable and productive and improving across time they're self-defeating and so you can play a power game and you can win short-term victories with a power game but it's not a sustainable iterable medium to long-term viable strategy you know that France dewal for example the primatologist studied chimpanzees so you know we have this Trope and I think it's a consequence of marxist influence on biologists that the hierarchies of chimpanzees for example which are masculine hierarchies in the main are predicated on power you know the alpha

chimp is the most powerful Tyrant and he dominates all the others and that's why he's reproductively successful dewal showed very clearly that there are alphas who use power but they have short Reigns fractious communities and they're extremely likely to to uh suffer a early a premature violent death right so it it is a niche in that you can force compliance but the stable Alphas that dewal studied were the most reciprocal male chimpanzees of the troop right they made the most lasting friendships and so that's a whole different model of the mediation of attention let's say

than one that's predicated on power so do you think it's fair when you're assessing the postmodern Corpus philosophical Corpus you talked about the subjective element where do you think the claim that the postmodern claim that power is essentially the dominant narrative where do you think that fits in with this claim with regards to subjectivity yeah that's a good question I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice power properly conceived could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done in right yeah yeah and our

cognitive Powers right if we have a good healthy epistemology right uh should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world even cooperatively that's yeah no that's that's that's exactly right um uh but then if you however are skeptical if you do start with the epistemology all of the postmodern do come out of a an epistemological training um it's a striking fact you know the big name postmoderns so we mentioned der dah leotard Fuko RoR right and the others they are all phds in philosophy they're all doing heavy duty work in

epistemology at their graduate and doctoral level work and that does come to become the the foundation and because of the time that they are working in middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy the revealing uh theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time so they came of age now what that then is to say is if you don't think right that human beings can know the world as individuals right then you don't think of developing your reason developing your capacity for Logic for rationality

for understanding is the most important thing about human beings so what then is it to be a human being and to the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus then we are going to become closer to chimps and then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world are going to are going to become more predominant or even lower than chimps uh baboons yeah who are even more of a baboon model yeah it might be but fractious fascist so I think this though shows the absolute

importance though of these cognitive issues that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition that it is efficacious that it is competent that our brain mind is an enormously powerful tool and if we learn to use it well we will survive and flourish better as individuals and socially we will start to work out the win-win positive some social things otherwise we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to Chimp and baboon kinds of kinds of levels the that regression becomes the

use of power as The Meta narrative that the postmodernists hypothetically abandon that's right they're all they're all yeah they're all left with it so that's right that's what they're left you're getting rid of right Co human cognitive power as a as a positive thing then you ask well what's left if it's not the case that I think my human cognition my mind puts me in touch with reality and that I can work out reality and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality and of course maybe we're initially focusing on things we have different

Frameworks but that we nonetheless have the cognitive tools to talk about these things to do the experiments to I can visit you what you've experienced take each other's position in service of some higher goal that's right and that we can work all of these things out to in effect have an agreed upon understanding of the nature of of of reality then uh if that's not what's going on that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand reality reality starts to drop out of the picture and what the postmoderns then do is either say

well I make up my own reality that's what's going on here or some of them are more passive uh all of the influences of more environmental deterministic understandings of human beings what we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment or your social upbringing right and so on so again we don't have an A Dom patriarchy yeah or there could be any sort of uh of social structure from from from from their perspective but that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships it's not me in relation to

reality and other people are part of reality so I have to work that out but rather the assumption is that I am inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality M and so the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be and the word there that becomes most important is the power word but it's a kind of social power so that tilts them towards that social constructionism oh yeah Absol well yeah no it's a social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding of power but the power for them

cannot be the positive sum kind of power that we're talking about because that understanding of positive some power depends on we can figure out the way the world works and do science and technology and make the world better place and Empower ourselves we can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful I can understand that you're a rational person uh and you can understand that I'm a rational person so I have to treat you a certain way conversationally socially and so forth uh so all of the positive some social stuff is going to come

out of that but the postmoderns have cut all of that away all left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social world and what they then call power just is the the influence or tools including the tools of language that are now understood as have nothing to do with the nature of reality but as being socially constructed themselves and tools of power that's right and so it becomes then necessarily a zero sum socially influencing and controlling game and they reinterpret everything in terms of

that yeah yeah okay okay so I think what we'll do is stop there we've come to the end of the time for the YouTube section I'd like to continue this discussion on The Daily wire side but what I would like to talk about with you there is power in service of what yeah right because there has to be unless you I mean you could hypothesize that power in itself is a desirable good but then you have to Define power in a way that would make the desirability of it self-evident alternatively you have to say that

you want power for a reason so I want to talk to you about that get your thoughts on that can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses too okay yeah yeah yeah yeah well you that maybe we could close with that too you had you've taped three additional courses I've done five courses yes three are in post production two are okay and what are the three that are coming up one is on Modern eth uh so what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse more Global more Multicultural and more

critical in some ways of traditional models that have come down to us so it's a much more wideopen world what's interesting about the modern world is how little we have uh what I think of as kind of homogeneous cultures where everybody by and large on the same philosophical Rel collapse of that meta narrative yeah that that particular went away and so we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good what is bad what's right what is wrong what's the meaning of my life how should we organize ourselves socially so what

I did was uh chose uh eight uh completely different but extraordinarily influential uh modern moral philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them okay so it goes uh uh goes back to uh people like David Hume wrestling with the is a problem and Emanuel Kant with his strong Duty Focus John Stewart Mills utilitarianism and so on in through the 20th century up to very contemporary times so that's one course modern ethics and all of these people are are giants they all disagree with each other but that's the Contemporary landscape within which people who are

doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves the other two courses are 16 letter in total but it uh called the philosophy of politics and here what I'm interested in is obviously we have political science we have political Theory political ideology uh practical day-to-day understandings of politics but what I'm interested in is the philosophers contributions to those debates and one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics they're not actually disagreeing about politics they're disag something more fundamental I think that's become evident to every that's right and

in many cases right it it's it's not it doesn't get brought to the core so I don't want to talk about the recent election but really it's about culture right more fundamentally and not about many particular issues and underlying culture both the other courses are dealing with that right so one though picks up with the French Revolution which is perhaps the land mark uh event in European or at least Continental European history uh why that political revolution happened and there's a lot of philosophy that matters there but then also uh an important theoretician Edmund Burke

and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism in response to that but then we go through all of the big name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics so we go through Hegel and Marx and as we get into the 20th century we talk about the fascists musolini and genti who was a PhD in philosophy and haiger and the National Socialist friederick Hayek John Mayor kees and that one ends with World War I so French Revolution to the World War II the next course picks up at the end of World War II and the

Cold War and it starts with uh Rand and Robert noik at the height of the Cold War how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context uh so starts with them goes on to John rolls uh uh we also talk about James Buchanan who won the Nobel Prize for public Choice economics uh we also do some International uh because we you know we're living in a global society that cliche and so on but the uh the islamist revolutions and the philosopher the Egyptian philosopher s kba who brother was a professor of

Osama bin Laden uh extraordinarily influential the ayat had kpa's Works translated into fari before he became Ayatollah we go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugan in that framework as well and then we uh end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism uh Roger scrutin meaning of conservatism which came out a few years before he died so the idea here is to say these are the big name political theories you need to know but they're all bigname ones because they are have philosophical bite behind them

by some very deep people and integrating that with the history in each case how some of them are urging history in a certain direction or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the cold war or or or the attacks so if people watch all the courses that you have offered so all five of them they're going to get a pretty decent overview of the major thinkers of the last 500 years in the philosophical ethical and political Realms that's my ambition that's a good deal that's a good deal I want to watch

those courses there's lots of things that you're lecturing about that I don't know about I'd like to know the nuances I'd like to know the details so yeah so I'm very much looking forward to that so well thank you very much for coming to Scottdale today real pleasure yeah it's great and it's great to have you on board on Peterson Academy too so and I think we'll talk too on the daily wire side a little bit about the perils pitfalls and opportunities of online highly produced online education because I'd like to get some of your

opinions about that too all right so we'll do that thank you very much sir oh I should I should give this to you too so yeah this is my new book which is coming out on the 19th and so we who wrestle with God and so um I'm making a case in this book fundamentally that well we talked about the Rel ship between story and perception but I'm trying to explain in this book why the notion of sacrifice is the central story in the biblical Corpus making the case that sacrifice is equivalent to work and

that sacrific is by necessity the foundation of the community that those two things are so tightly Associated that they're they're they're equivalent there's no difference between sacrifice and Community they're the same thing so anyways I'd like out to you I will yeah yeah well I'd certainly be interested in in your thoughts on it as well and so it's coming out very soon and um I tried to make sure that everything that I wrote in it was hopefully justifiably theologically and traditionally but also scientifically like I wanted the stories to make sense at both levels of

analysis at the same time so you know that's a tight triangulation so to speak but and who knows if it's successful but that was the rule of thumb so anyway it's very good talk to you today pleasure so yeah I'm looking forward to our continued collaboration on the Peterson Academy side me too all right so all of you watching and listening you can join us on the daily wi side we're going to talk about two things we're going to talk about the Practical and hypothetical future of online education and we're going to talk about the

relationship what would you say the the the value of power from the postmodern perspective why would people be interested in power you might think that's self-evident but lots of things that appear self-evident aren't at all on more detailed analysis so um you can join us for another half an hour of that discussion if you would thank you to the film crew here in Scottdale today and and my producer Joy H for putting this together she's been working extremely hard on the set side and the production side and you know the podcast is improving in quality

quite dramatically in consequence we've got all sorts of new things lined up for you in the very near future there'll be some announcements on that front very soon thank you very much for your time and attention to okay [Music]