Started I started see because I'm interested in this idea of strengthening the individually
That's and when I when I wrote my first book maps of meaning it was about ideological conflict
And it was about whether or not there was any alternative to ideological
Conflict because you could make a case that there isn't there's right and there's left and there's a war right
but there is a third way, and I think that is the way of the heroic individual, and I mean that technically and
that that
involves the development of individual characters so that you can say what it is that you think that you can
Articulate your experience properly and that you can bring what it is
That's unique to you into the collective landscape, and that's what updates the collective landscape
It's absolutely vital and so I started doing these biblical lectures
they have done 12 of them now walking through Genesis, and what I'm trying to do because I believe that the Bible is the
documentation of the emergence of the idea of the divine individual that's essentially what it is and
We we have a very uneasy relationship with that
collection of texts now because
They we read them as if they're making claims about the objective nature of the world and those claims seem to be false
from a scientific perspective
I don't believe that those are the claims that were made to begin with so I think it's a non-starter
but I've been trying to lecture about the stories in Genesis for example in a manner that makes them accessible to people who are
well to
Atheists let's say and many many atheists have been responding very positively
To them I have people in my youtube comments now that are calling themselves Christian atheists
Because they can understand they understand what it is. I'm describing
This idea that's emerged in the West that consciousness is the mediator between chaos and order and the and the and that
Generating the phenomena that generates experience and that and that you can think about that as as
a divine category of
Existence and I've been trying to delineate how?
how the
Biblical stories lay out the pathway by which the divine
individual should manifest him or herself in time because that is what it is, and I and I I've
Been studying for example the Abrahamic stories, which I didn't know well and the Abrahamic stories are really interesting I mean
Ham is called by God and when Abraham is called by God. He's old
He's like one of these guys who's 40 years old and his stayed in his mother's basement. That's that's Abraham
It's a little late for Abraham to be getting the hell out there in the world and God basically says to him
Leave your family and your friends and your place of comfort and journey into the land of the stranger
That's the call to adventure and so Abraham does that now he's chosen by God
You think well everything goes well for Abraham that isn't what happens at all the first thing
He encounters is a famine and to escape that he flees into the tyranny of Egypt where they try to steal his wife
It's like beware of being called by God
You know you'd think it'd be all sweetness and light after that. It's not that at all. It's a very realistic story
It's like get the hell out of where you're safe
Into what you don't know what are you gonna find there? Well your fortune? No you're gonna find the catastrophes of life
But if you keep yourself morally oriented, and you make the right sacrifices, which is the the Abrahamic story to a tee then you can?
Transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail. I mean it's who the hell doesn't want to hear that
So we're treading kind of close to the
The argument you got into with Sam Harris about the nature of truth and and since I heard that I've been
Sort of itching to have this conversation with you because I think there's a a way of viewing this that will actually
Perhaps reconcile the two points of view, but there's a bitter pill that comes along with it, so here's here's my argument
We tend to think of
Intellect has evolved as as having evolved because knowing what's true gives you an advantage
But there's actually nothing that says the literal truth is where advantage lies
And so I have a category that I call literally false metaphorically true
These are ideas that aren't true in the factual sense
But they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true you come out ahead of where you would be if you
Behaved according to the fact that they're not true, so let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial
Porcupines can throw their quills
not true
however if you live near porcupines
And you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills you'll give them some space if you don't
you may
Realize and that the cancer other quills get really close to one and it may wheel around and nail you with a porcupine quill which?
Can be extremely dangerous because they are
Microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you over time and they can puncture a vital organ
Or you can get an infection
So the person who believes that a porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn't
Predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal truth, right
another one might be
People say everything happens for a reason right well unless you're talking about physics as the reason
everything doesn't happen for a reason however if you are the kind of person who believes that everything happens for a reason and
Then some terrible tragedy befalls you you may be on the lookout well. What's the reason that this happened?
Maybe it's supposed to open some opportunity, and you won't miss that opportunity the way somebody who was preoccupied with their misfortune would so
Literal falseness, but metaphorical truth is actually I would argue the category under which
religious truth evolves
Now the problem the bitter pill that I mentioned
Is that I've heard you say that the truths that are captured in the the religious version of things
are basically like
You know there's an individual truth, and then there's a truth of your family
And there's the truth of the population that you're living in and these things are all encoded in these
These doctrines which is true and you would expect it to be because the doctrines are carried along in the population
The problem is what I hear you arguing and you tell me if I have it wrong is that we should therefore?
expect
the
encoded metaphorical truths in these religious traditions to be
morally, right
But there's nothing that actually says it will be morally right because there are metaphorical truths that might in fact be reprehensible
but nonetheless effective and
so
What I would argue the overarching point here would be that
you're right that the
Documents that contain these descriptions of things are full of things that are true in some sense that is not
Literal scientific truth in our ways that their their purpose
What isn't true is that those things are inherently up-to-date?
And see I would okay. I mean first of all the first thing about that
is that a
Discussion like that and this is also what happened with sam harris takes me to the very limits of my intellectual ability and so
even in discussing it i'm going to make all sorts of mistakes because
Because it's treacherous territory, but I would say my understanding of the great myths
Has that observation built into it so one of the archetypes is that of the of the tyrannical father?
Which is the archetype by the way that possesses the minds of people who?
Accuse Western society of being patriarchal they're possessed by a singular archetype, and that's the archetype of the tyrannical father
They don't see that
There's a tyrannical father and a wise king because there is that's that's you can't even point that out, but anyways
In the in the old in in some of our oldest stories
There's a representation of the dead past so let me give you an example that everyone knows about
The story of Pinocchio is the story of the individualization of Pinocchio he starts out as a puppet. He's a marionette
He's a wooden head. He's a liar and he's
Pulled by forces that he does not understand right okay, so but he has a good father
That's Geppetto
and so he's got a good and Geppetto wishes that he becomes a real individual and
So and he knows that that's an impossible wish he wishes on a star that his son can become an actual individual knowing full well
That that's unlikely and impossible so Geppetto is a good king so but the story is also about Geppetto
Because what happens is that when Geppetto loses Pinocchio loses his son which way you could think about as the active dynamic
attentive force of youth
Then he ends up
Stultified in the belly of a whale which is a symbol of chaos at the bottom of the ocean and then Pinocchio has to rescue
him, so I would say there is an instantiation of
evolutionarily accumulated wisdom in great stories of the past
But they're still dead and it requires the Union. This is why in Christian theology
the the Godhead has a
Tripartite structure, this is part of the reason
There's God the Father, but the father's dead the father was right a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago
And is still partly right, but he's dead he can't
participate in the updating of the process so you need an active force now the active force is the same thing that
Generated those stories across time right so it's it's the same thing except
It's also alive in the present and so your moral duty
And this is another thing that happens and in Pinocchio is to rescue your dead father from the belly of the whale and that's partly
What I'm trying to do with these biblical lectures because your objection is correct the reason. It's correct is because
Even if the solution was correct the landscape has changed and it's changed incrementally or in a revolutionary way
We don't know and so those old truths are at best partial and at worst blind
But that doesn't mean you can just say like like Mao did during the Cultural Revolution well, let's just destroy the past
It's like no that would be like saying well
You don't need a body anymore because your body is the collected wisdom of the evolutionary process
Across three and a half billion years I absolutely agree because the stories are not literal
It's impossible to know whether they well not impossible
But very difficult to know whether or not the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant if it's been inverted
and it's now absolutely false or
So Carl Jung talked about this a lot and and one of the things he said was that
Your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the in the confines of your own life, and so you say well
There's an archetype of perfection that pervades the West and for the for the sake of argument
I'm going to call that Christ the Christ image. It's something like that. That's the archetypal image now
We have a story about what Christ's historical life was like well. Well well
You can't have that life because you would have had to be in the Middle East 2,000 years ago
That's not your life
But what you can do is take the archetypal and you can manifest it was within the confines of your own life
And what that does is?
Force you to undergo the difficult process of updating the ancient wisdom
And you don't just forego it you can't or you can
but you'll pay a massive price and part of that will be social disintegration because it's it's
The the past is alive enough so that those of us who inhabit its corpse aren't
Clawing each other to death while we're feeding right. That's the critical issue now
It's not alive enough because the bloody thing could fall apart at any moment
And we need to be awake and alert in order to keep it updated and maintained well
not only that but
They're the greatest hazards to us in the present are only partially going to be dealt with in these texts
And that's that's my biggest concern is that you know if we take
You know Dawkins dismissing religion as mind virus
This is very
Dangerous because it neglects the truth that you're talking about and it prevents us from getting to a conversation in which we can talk about
the fact that
religious texts religions are not
Mind viruses they are adaptations to past environments they do contain a kind of truth that isn't necessarily literal and is in general not literal
But none of them no ancient religion is up-to-date for Google's
Algorithms being the hazard to civilization that it probably is we need to figure out how to navigate
Where the ancestral wisdom is simply not up to the current day?
So let me modify that slightly because I think it's true and not true the stories are
erroneous in detail and right in pattern so for example
There's an idea that one of the things that the mythological hero does is stand up against the tyranny of the state?
Now you don't have to specify the nature of the tyranny of the state in order for that to be a truth
That's applicable across different context. I would say what's happened with the great religious. Myths is that they've they operate at a level of abstraction
Such that the the abstract entities are applicable in every single environment. I'll give an example of that
It is extremely useful to
Represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order
that works in every single environment for every person and so the domain of order I
can describe it technically you're in the domain of order when your actions produce the result you desire and
you're in the domain of chaos when they don't and
Then and then I could say well your task is to
Straddle the border between those two domains because you don't always want to be where everything that you're doing is working because you don't learn
anything and you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is working because it's overwhelming you want to be stable and
Dynamic at the same point and the Daoists do that very nicely because they have a chaos order
conceptualization of the of the phenomenological landscape and their claim is
the
The point of maximum proper being is right at the center of the border between chaos and order, and I think that's true across
Contexts, so I don't think that truth ages
some of them don't but the question really is one of at what point is there so much legacy code that the
Taking the package is
is
More harmful than it is beneficial and at what point are you know if God were writing today?
I'm pretty convinced the first commandment would be thou shalt not enrich uranium
It would make sense as the number one commandment. It's not there because uranium
Wasn't a concept at the point that the thing was written nor was the hazard of enriching it obvious and so
The fact that it isn't mentioned
Tends to de-emphasize it as a risk and so I guess the question is is it possible
I mean is it possible that by
recognizing that these
traditions carry huge
amounts of ancestral wisdom forward
But that that wisdom is certain to be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern questions
That we can be liberated to move forward and to honor those traditions for bringing us here
But to recognize that we actually have to move forward with something more potent and up to date
which is not not easy because you can't just take the scientific truth of the moment and
Implement a lot of it isn't even right. It's yeah
It's also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale you know and I mean some of these fairy tales that people are trying to
Rewrite in modern times are perhaps fifteen thousand years old and people think well we can just update that so that
The modern version will be better it turns out that that's very very difficult
And there's another I'm gonna play devil's advocate against my own position here
You know because I say well the religious texts encode profound and evolutionarily determined truths that are universal ok which
religious texts right
Well because you might say well all of them, but then that means that obscures the important differences between the traditions
And I'm by no means certain that all of them
Do you know so I'm going to stick my neck way the hell out because why not it isn't obvious to me that Islam does
Because I it's very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam
Doesn't make it unique among religions, so now good so well
There's that out on the tape if you don't mind
but
Isn't the issue using the word truth because we can say true
We could use tradition and wisdom and we're ok, but as soon as we start saying truth
Then then we run into problems. I mean and even when you're talking about porcupines. Will you talk about?
What would you say metaphorical truth verses look? It's not true. It's real simple
Just don't go near the porcupine teach the kid to not go near the porcupine because porcupine quills are dangerous
They get stuck in you they're really dangerous can they throw it out
You know they cannot
But just stay clear of them because you don't want them to somehow another get in touch with your body
There's no truth in that they can throw their quills at you you benefit from being
particularly aware of the dangers of their quills
But if you tell a kid that they can throw their quills and so therefore the kid stays clear of him
He has a faulty assumption in his head you're lying to them for their own protection, and I was not good
I wouldn't do it. I think the same thing can be said of everything happens for a reason well. Here's the problem
We don't know if everything happens for a reason, maybe when you die you go to some auditing room
And they go well, you know it's all just a part of some gigantic algorithm that you're impossible
it's impossible for you to understand due to your limited processing power of the human brain you're dealing with some simian sort of
complex
geometry, that's really just design keep your body moving and keep you alive and spread your genetics so that you can eventually evolve to the
point when you're a god well
First of all I I have kids I wouldn't I tell them that a porcupine
I'm sure he wins, but how do I use the word truth though? Ah because well the question is why do people?
Tell you that a porcupine can throw its quills
I don't think they do oh
They do well if they do they don't know any better right or they're liars right and so all I'm saying is that actually that?
Is likely to be the product of?
Selection in other words that those people who had encoded that they do throw their quills have an advantage
It's not the way. I would do it and for exactly the reason that you point out
Which is if you give a child the wrong model of a porcupine?
I don't know whether a porcupine is liable to be the gateway to some more important question
But if it were you've just steered the kid wrong well something here's part of the problem
And this is part of and this is a really big problem. There's two things
I guess that were brought up by what you described and the first is the terminology of truth
Now Harris's claim with regards to my utilization of truth was that I was
absconded with the definition of truth and in false manner
But he was wrong because the idea of truth is much older than the idea of objective truth and the original notion of truth wasn't
objective true
It was like the arrow flies straight and true right it meant something like reliably
Reliably on its way to the appropriate destination
Something like that and when Christ said I am the truth and the way when I can't remember light of it yes
Yes, the truth. He was talking about wasn't an objective truth so Sam's idea that I had somehow
You know taken the idea of truth. That was actually objective all along and done something crooked with it is just wrong
It's wrong. Well. There's no truth can have multiple definitions
Well that maybe there was that that's the issue and that's exactly what we're what we're trying to get at here is like
There's to me
There's two kinds of truth
and and they may be
They may be commensurate you may be able to stack them on top of one another but now and then they dissociate and this is
Actually, what what what Bret was referring to as well so?
So and this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely manage it
there's a there's the truth that manifests itself in the manner in which you act and
there's the truth that manifests itself as a representation of the objective world and
Sometimes both those truths are stacked on top of each other and sometimes
They're not so like I could give you a piece of wisdom that would work
Well if you acted it out that carried within it an inaccurate
Representation of part of the objective world and you could say well
Maybe that's actually the case with the biblical stories because if you read them as science they don't read well
So let's take malaria as a good example malaria the root of the word is mal area bad air right
Malaria is not transmitted by bad air
It's transmitted by mosquitos that live in places where you might think the air is bad so the point is
It's part of the way there. That's that's a good one and that also gets see there's another weird
Distinction here and that I was trying to draw with Sam
But that's a really tricky one and we ordered in because we started to talk about pragmatism
but there's also something like the truth of a
Description and the truth of a tool and my sense is that people's fundamental truths are too alike
we use them to function properly in the world and you could say well a
Sharp axe is more true than a dull axe and actually you can use the word true in that sense that actually isn't appropriate
appropriate use of the word
there there are tool truths, and there are objective fact truths now and
In the optimal circumstance those map on to each other
But we're not smart enough often to make the map onto each other because we just don't know enough and there are lots of truths
That we have that portray the objective world improperly that are still true
Is this problem using the term true when sometimes you should use the term fact like yes?
One plus one is two that is a fact one plus one is two is also true
You throw some water on a match that is and it'll go out. That's a fact. Yes. Well as
I see it at least there is this overarching truth
the one that sam harris was pointing to the one I think you're pointing to also and the one I
I'm imagining we all subscribe to right
There is the testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory were in a careful experiment in the field
And that really is the top-level truth, but then there are the truths you can't speak yet
So let's take the word filth from from the Old Testament
Okay, filth means shit right you're not supposed to shit in camp because God finds it offensive
Now the problem is the germ theory of disease doesn't come about for thousands of years after that truth was written
That truth keeps you from infecting people
Long before you can ever explain that there are microbes that grow in human shit that are a particular danger to your population
So the point is would you rather be held back to the place where you can actually describe the?
Literal underpinnings of what's going on or do you want to be liberated to say something that actually results in?
an improvement in health
Before you know literally thousands of years before anybody had any idea that it was microbes at the root of this
Yes
you need to figure out so an
elaboration of that would be something like human beings needed to figure out how to act without dying before they could
Understand the nature of the world well enough to justify that right and somebody might be crazy
Now that we do have the germ theory of disease to to amplify that
Original crude version of the truth or that crude approximation of what you need to believe in order to behave
safely
There's no reason for that truth to to be promoted in fact. You don't hear people describing this part of the Old Testament
It's not relevant right. This is probably all why dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well shellfish red tide
eating pigs
Trichinosis, there's a lot of a lot of issues that go along with that. Yeah well
There is some intermingling perhaps of hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves from other groups
Right because you can you can unite your group quite tightly by dietary restrictions so um back to your point about
Terminology you know we could we could do something like
fact and wisdom
You know you say truth
That's the overarching category and then that divides into fact and wisdom and what you want
Optimally is you want the facts and the wisdom to be one not one-to-one?
But often they're not and if you find wisdom where the facts aren't laid right out
You don't just get to throw away the wisdom which is what I think happens in the case of people like Dawkins and Harrison Harris
Makes another sleight-of-hand move which I don't like which is that he thinks so let's say
except for just a second the wisdom fact distinction
He would say well the fact is the thing and the wisdom is a second-order
Derivation of that you can ground the wisdom in the fact
And I don't believe that and I don't think that he has he I don't think that he has any real
Justification for that claim and this is something we are doing by grounding the wisdom in the fact
He thinks if you know the facts clearly enough. You'll know how to act
Well, that's not necessarily true well
There's ways to act with that every within your best interest
And then there's ways to act that are within the the interest of all the people around you've been made might not serve you that
Well well this diction is where ethics come right or right right the consequences are delayed yes
Some number of generations sure yes well
That's a big problem and right so so
Sam acts as if the process of mac mapping facts onto action is simple if we just got the facts right but
But it's the weakest part of his argument, and we never ever got to that for a variety of reasons
But part of the reason it's weak is okay well
There's like an infinite number of facts, man
Which so let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field
The field does not tell you how to walk through it
there's a million ways through the field and
No matter how many facts about the field you aggregate?
You're not going to be able to determine the appropriate path by aggregating those facts
So it's that's and that that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously and well well
I think there are two problems tangled up here one of them is
there's a question of re is one individual supposed to have all of the facts and
navigate based on on that sort of the rationality community version of things or
Does you know the practical truth is we can't all be experts in everything and so we have to go along with you know
Guides to our behavior that are approximate and that that's inherent and then there's a question about civilization
civilization should be guided by our best understanding of what's actually true, but with an understanding that we don't have a
complete map of a lot of stuff
And so I think what you're pointing at is that there is wisdom that has been handed to us
That is not such that we can just simply say
Oh, here's the Nugget at the center of it
And we need to preserve that thing because we don't necessarily know what it's doing down
Which is you know?
That's this is dangerous because some of what it's doing may not be acceptable well
And then think about let's look at the wisdom end of things for a minute
and you talked you've alluded a little earlier to like iterations and and
About the fact that things are iterated across time and that's something that works now might fail
dreadfully in a month or two months
So so here's here's what something has to be like to be wise let's say well first of all
Let's say it would be good. If as it was in accordance with the facts, but we'll leave that aside for now
It has to work if you operate according to the wisdom principle. Whatever it is. It has to work in the world
but then it has to work in a world that allows you to maintain your
Relationships with people in the world right so it's all of a sudden this wisdom thing is something
That's not only constrained by let's call it objective reality
But it's constrained by the necessity of a social contract a functional social contract
So you're only able to you're only allowed to
Put forward actions in the world that would be of benefit to you if they simul taneous
Lee don't undermine the structure within which you live, okay
And then there's a game theory element to that which is
Well if it's wise then it works in the world so that would be the constraint of objective reality
But then it works for you now
and
The you that'll be in a week and the you that'll be in a month and it works for you
And your family and it works for you and your family and society
And it works in a way that those things all line up
To be iterated across time and so this this is actually they're also the solution is funny
I really like to hear what you think about this
I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum because the post modernists bless their heart, so we'll give the devil his due say
Well the problem is there's an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts and the right response to that is oh?
oh
That's true. That's true. That's not good and that's why the post modernist say well
You can't agree on a canonical interpretation of a great piece of literature because then of potential
Interpretations are infinite and so then they say well
Why should we settle on any one interpretation then why should we privilege one over another and then they say well that's all power games?
And so that's how you got to take that seriously, but what they missed and this is a big deal. It's a big deal
I think is this idea of of
Ethical constraint, it's like yes. There's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations, but
hardly any of them will work in the real world and
Hardly any of them will work in the real world in a way that doesn't get you killed by other people or doom you
because of your own stupidity to failure across time and so the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite, but the landscape of
applicable
Interpretation functional interpretation is unbelievably constrained, and I think that constraint system is what we regard as ethics. It's something like that
