Solving the Problem of Human Perception | Cambridge | EP 242

[Music] What a pleasure it is to see you all! Uh, what a pleasure it is to be here! Uh, but most of all, what a pleasure it is to introduce to you this afternoon someone who has encouraged millions of people, millions of young people in particular, to probe, evaluate, ask questions that are more fundamental than any other questions with which every one of us is confronted at some point. Questions involving meaning, identity, relationship, dignity, and what it is to flourish as a person.

He doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but anyone who has tried walking with him the length of King's Parade here in Cambridge in less than half an hour will know that he seems to be asking the right questions and he seems to be reaching young minds and young hearts in ways that very few other academics in the world that I can think of come anywhere close to doing.

Here in England for a couple of weeks, and for most of those two weeks, he's going—he has been and will continue to be—here in Cambridge. We are lending him to the other place for a day or two and as part of that visit he has been through what have been, at least up until now, I’ll be frank with you, some pretty grueling and critical seminars, research seminars on his work. He has opened himself up to criticism, he has been receptive to it, he has responded to it in an exemplary fashion. Uh, he has also taken part in a public lecture, one last night at Gondolin Keys, hosted by Dr. Arif Ahmed. Here tonight, the flagship event at the university. He'll be speaking at the Cambridge Union tomorrow, at the other Union on Thursday, and Westminster next week.

In accepting this invitation to come to Cambridge, he has, I think, showed extraordinary graciousness toward an institution that has not been as welcoming to him in the past as it might have been.

Who is our speaker? He is the professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto. Uh, he is a clinical psychologist. He's the author of "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief" (1999). He's the author, most famously perhaps, of the popular work "12 Rules for Life" (2018) that has sold many millions of copies and has topped best seller lists in Brazil, the Netherlands, the United States, and Australia, and in too many other countries to mention.

And in the ruins of the multiversity, he is building a metaversity. His lectures online, these long conversations with public commentators, religious leaders, journalists, and artists are mesmerizing millions of people a week. In doing that, I believe he is part of a movement that is doing nothing less than widening the horizons of the humanities in the modern world.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Jordan Peterson!

Well, thank you very much for the kind welcome and all the kind words. It's been really remarkable to be here. It's such a wonderful place and I hope you all know that, and it's so beautiful and so deep and so rich and in the best possible way. And it's been so welcoming and it's such a privilege, it's an unbelievable privilege to have that happen so I thank all of you for your attendance today as well.

And so, we're going to try to work our way through a problem today. Uh, it's a problem I've been attempting to wrestle with for a very long time and in one way or another, whether we know it or not, we're all wrestling with it, and it's the problem of perception.

Um, five decades ago, I suppose, the problem made itself explicitly manifest at a deeper level than it ever had before, although philosophers had wrestled with this problem for a very long period of time. And part of the problem was how much do we bring to the act of perception and imagination and thought, and how much is revealed to us by what we perceive?

We thought we understood that, I would say, well enough to make practical progress after the Second World War, but there were doubts that bedeviled people operating in all sorts of disciplines that became, as I said, increasingly explicit in those decades.

And I think for me the most remarkable revelation of the problem probably occurred in the world of artificial intelligence. I learned about this when I was studying models of cognitive processes that were initially generated by Russian investigators like Sokolov and Vinogradova, who were very well-known names in the Russian neuropsychological literature, which is a very, um, academically impressive literature. They were students of Luria, I think both Vinograd and Sokolov were students of Luria, who is perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist of the last mid-part of the 20th century. They were convinced to some degree that we built internal models of the world and then compared what was going on in the world to those models.

Sokolov discovered a phenomenon called the orienting reflex, which was an electrophysiological response to error detection or response to novelty—that’s another way of thinking about it. And he should have won a Nobel Prize for that because discovering the instinctual basis of the response to novelty—that's no small thing. There's a lot of novelty in the world, and Sokolov really mapped that in some sense onto the body and onto the nervous system in a way that superseded what philosophers had done before that because it made it much more concrete and tied it down to the underlying neural architecture.

So for example, if you're walking down the road and there’s a loud noise behind you and the noise is of indeterminate meaning—so perhaps a car has jumped a curb, that's a possibility—you'll go like that and stop and turn and orient towards the place in the space-time continuum where your stereo vision has localized the noise. And you do that really without thinking. I would say it's an act that occurs outside the domain of free will, and the reason you do that is because you might die if something unexpected happens, right? Something that's outside your framework of expectation.

Now, you know your framework of expectation; you're an ignorant creature. You don't know everything. You don't even know that much and your representation of the world is actually rather shallow and low resolution. It's good enough to get you where you want to go most of the time, but sometimes it isn't. And sometimes it's error-ridden enough given the circumstances of time and place that the error will kill you.

And so you're equipped with instinctual mechanisms that orient you towards the source of the revelation of your ignorance. And that's something very interesting to contemplate, I would say, physiologically and neurophysiologically, but also philosophically, and I would also say to some degree theologically, right? That you have an instinct that orients you to the source of your ignorance, and you better have an instinct like that because there may be a shortage of knowledge, but there's no shortage of ignorance.

And so, and that's, you know, part of the problem of the relationship between the finite and the infinite, right? I mean, we're finite creatures; we can't know everything. We can't even know as much as we need to know, and that means in some sense we have to be able to deal with the fact that we don't know enough.

And one of what Sokolov outlined, at least in part, was the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms that made this orienting reflex possible. One way you can measure it, for example, is if you put on a gadget, a galvanometer on someone's finger, and you play them a sequence of tones.

When you play them the first tone, they'll show quite a response, and then the second tone, lesser, and after that lesser, until finally it'll flatline. And people thought about that as habituation, but the more sophisticated cognitive scientists regarded it as the building of an internal model of the stimulus in all its varieties of parameters. Interesting word: stimulus—we'll return to that.

And then if you play someone a different tone after habituating them to that sequence, the electrophysiological response will re-instantiate itself. Or even if you alter the spacing between the tones, the same thing will happen and that's all part of this response to novelty and then the mapping of novel territory. This is unbelievably important, this discovery, because you don't learn anything except by encountering it as novelty first. So it’s fundamentally the initial processes of everything you do to learn everything there is to learn, everywhere, all the time.

And so, like I said, he should have won a Nobel Prize, but people really didn't understand the fundamental significance of this discovery, and a very influential line of English British neuropsychology emerged out of that because a gentleman named Jeffrey Gray, who was the most outstanding student, I would say, of Hans Eysenck, who is the most cited psychologist, research psychologist in the world for pretty much the last half of the 20th century.

Jeffrey Gray wrote an incredibly brilliant book called "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety," where he integrated the work the Russians had done, which very few people knew about apart from Gray, who read absolutely everything by the neuropsychology of anxiety. I think it cited 300 scientific deep scientific papers, neurophysiological papers, and animal behavioral papers—like hardcore psychology—because there is such a thing.

And he actually read all those papers, and he actually understood them, and then he integrated that with Norbert Wiener's, who was one of the fathers of cybernetics and computer science. He integrated that with Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theory and with a raft of animal experimental material and laid out the neurological basis for the establishment of the orienting reflex and also for the establishment of memory itself.

It's a tour de force; that book was written in 1982, and psychologists have really only begun to digest the material in that book. So, um, I read it when I was, well, back in about 1982—very soon after it was published. It took me like six months to read it because, well, I had to learn animal physiology and neuropsychology and animal behavioral science and cybernetic theory and just along the way to understand what he was talking about, you know? It's a profound work of philosophy.

I would say it's probably a necessary work of modern philosophy because we're starting to understand the underlying physiological substructure of many of the processes that have been discussed in the philosophical realm for forever.

And so, okay, so what does this have to do with this problem? Well, back to the AI researchers. So stemming from Sokolov's work at least in part was the idea that there's the world out there, and it's made out of objects, and they're sort of self-evident. But—and what we do is we build an internal model of that world—and then we compute trajectories, we make maps, we compute trajectories, we lay out plans that constitute a manipulation of that internal representation, and then we act out the representation.

And it's kind of an empirical idea, philosophically speaking. And the idea is that sense data is in some sense given to us and from that sense data, that given self-evident sense data, we build these models, and that's how we think and that's how we operate in the world.

And everyone—that's kind of folk psychology; everybody thinks, well, that's right, that's how it is. No, no, it's not right at all. And that's why we don't have general-purpose robots because what happened to the AI researchers was that they tried to build machines, built toy environments.

So imagine you're trying to build a basic robot, at least initially. You can't model the whole world, so you build toy environments that the AI system can model, and then you have it do simple things in the toy environment. You couldn't even get the machines to see the toy environment since part of what was discovered in AI was there were no toy environments.

Well, imagine even if you just have a simple environment that's made out of pyramids and columns, spheres—just simple geometric forms. Well, you still have the problem of variant lighting. It's like, well, is a pyramid in the morning the same as a pyramid at midday? What about five minutes past midday or three seconds past midday? Like how much lighting, how much illumination change is necessary before the object isn't the same object?

Well, maybe illumination doesn't have anything to do with the object. Well, that's kind of awkward because then you don't get to see it. And how is it that we managed to infer the stability of an object across transformations of illumination? And the answer is we don't know.

And how is it that we're able to perceive objects at all? Because the other thing that became complicated, and you see this if you ever use a program like Photoshop, you know you can see objects in a photo in Photoshop, and the objects appear self-evident; they have boundaries and borders. But if you zoom in, you can't tell where the boundaries are; they fade into all the other images that are behind or ahead or wherever they happen to be displayed.

And then while the image is quite different, if it's black and white, and then you can highlight the colors and expand them, and so there's an endless number of things you can do with the single image of anything. Well, you think about what that means; there's an endless number of things you can do with a single image of anything.

Well, how in the world is perception possible then? And the answer is we didn't know. While at approximately the same time, the same problem emerged in literary criticism, and you can see why in some sense, right? If you can't perceive something, even simple, in some canonical manner that's self-evident, how in the world can you derive a single reliable canonical interpretation of a given text?

And then you could multiply the problem. You say, well, it's bad enough for a single text, or maybe a single paragraph, or even a sentence because sentences are amenable to multiple interpretations, and complex sentences in the beginning are susceptible to an endless number of interpretations—really endless.

Well, endless is a problem, right? Because to perceive something there has to be an end; so endless is a real problem. And the cognitive psychologist, Metin Aguilar, who worked at MIT, they said a finite number of objects can be grouped in a near infinite number of ways.

Well, you think, well, imagine your shell, your books on a bookshelf. Well, you have the books, and then you have the sequence of books; you think that's all self-evident. How are you going to arrange those books? Well, that's a problem. If you've ever tried to sort out your library and if it's a big library, it's a big problem, right? You have to invent a very complex and sophisticated indexing system to know where the books are.

Well, the books on your shelf, you think, well there’s not—come on, really, there’s not a near infinite number of ways to arrange them? What, what are you talking about? And that's only the axiomatic self; that's the axiomatic structure of your a priori perception manifesting itself as self-evident fact to your ignorant mind because that claim is actually wrong.

So you might say, well, color, thickness, density, age. How about thickness of paper? How about the thickness of the spot exactly half an inch below the 35th page in the third chapter? And you think, well, that's a stupid way of organizing your books.

And I would say, well, how do you know it's stupid exactly and not sort of right? Because you can't just claim self-evidence in this situation because the self-evidence of the stupidity of that categorical structure is actually the mystery, and it's the mystery that, say, post-modernists encountered when they were trying to specify the canonical meaning of a text.

Just a single text. A single paragraph. A single sentence. There's a multiplicity of potential interpretations; even worse, there's a multiplicity of potentially valid interpretations. And so how do you do anything but throw up your hands and say, well, there is no solution to that problem? We, or at least—and this would be better—we have no idea how we solve this problem.

And what would even be better would be we have no idea how we solved it in the past. And say that's particularly germane when you think not even necessarily so much about the interpretation of a given text—let's say the bible, to take a complex, you know, problem—but the canon of texts itself.

Now, the canon of texts, the fact that there's a canon of text—roughly speaking, we can—we have agreed in the past to some degree on the boundaries of that category. Although there's plenty of cognitive activity around the edges trying to decide what would fit in and what wouldn't—which is exactly what happened, for example, when people were trying to aggregate the biblical corpus across time because the bible is, of course, a library of books.

What's in and what's out? Why is it in and why is it out? Well, the answer to how we answer that is we don't know how we answer that. And there's this process of deliberation, let's say, that is part and parcel of the process that gives rise to the aggregation of a library of texts into a corpus, but we don't really understand the mechanism.

We don't understand the mechanism at all, and that's actually all fine, except that we don't have general-purpose robots yet, although they probably are more or less around the corner in about five years, partly because the AI researchers solved this problem.

And part of the way they solved it was by embodying cognition, incarnating artificial intelligence in an embodied structure. And the first people to really propose that that was absolutely necessary—I don't necessarily know the first people, but I know that an MIT researcher named Rodney Brooks, who by the way invented the Roomba—some of you may have a Roomba, and it's kind of a laughable little object, but not really because it can sort of move around your house without falling down the stairs, and your two-year-old can't do that.

So the Roomba isn't nothing, right? And Brooks was one of the first people who really recognized that to solve the problem of perception we would have to duplicate the process of evolution in hardware. And so he started building these little machines that pretty much all they did to begin with was scoot away from light. And, well, eventually that became the Roomba, which is a pretty useful gadget, and you see variants in some sense of what he's done with self-driving cars because they're embodied systems as well, right? Because the car is actually a body that moves from place to place.

And it turns out that a lot of our perceptions require embodiment and it turns out that one of the philosophical consequences—implications of that is that the way we solved the problem of perception was through 3.5 billion years or thereabouts of evolution, and also that there was no other way of possibly solving it. And so that's a testimony to the power of evolutionary thinking, I would say, but even more a testimony to the power of the process of evolutionary development.

And you might think that that reduces human cognition to something sterile and mechanistic because many of the proponents of the notion of natural selection have adopted a fairly reductive materialism to account for the process of natural selection. And we're going to talk about that a little bit tonight too, I hope, if I can manage to tie all these things together.

So, no perception without embodiment—that’s pretty interesting! And so I could tell you, I'll tell you a little side neuropsychological story. So, you know, we tend to think that when we see the world, well, there the world is, and then we see the world, and we see the objects and there the objects are. But that isn't how it works. And I've tried to explain why because there's an infinite number of ways of perceiving even the simplest of visual scenes.

And then there's auditory scenes and then there's the problem of smell and there's the problem of touch. I mean these are hard problems, which is why it took three billion years to solve them. There's a condition called utilization behavior—it’s got an interesting neuropsychological condition. Generally, if it is affected right-handed people—that's relevant here—because of lateralization, if you have left prefrontal damage, you sometimes will engage in utilization behavior.

And what happens if you're afflicted by this neuropsychological condition is that you lose the ability to inhibit your motor responses to the presentation of an object. Now that's worth thinking about even though it doesn't sound like it's something that's necessarily worth thinking about because what do you mean motor response to an object? Because we think object, thought, motor response. But that's not how it works.

The object itself announces its utility in the perception, and so what that means is that your eyes, which map, let's say, patterns of arrays—that's a good way of thinking about it—they map that onto your visual system and, but part of your visual system is actually your motor output system. And so that when I look at, let’s say, this bottle, you think, I think bottle, hand grip, drink. But seeing bottle is hand grip, and hand grip is drink.

And so if you have utilization behavior, you lose the ability to inhibit the motor response to the object. And so if you had this condition, I put a cup in front of you, you would pick it up and drink from it. And if you walk down a hallway and there’s a door open, you will go through the door. And it's not because you see the object, door, and think door, and then think walk through, and then walk through, even though that's what you think.

You think that. That door is a walk-through place, and if you lack inhibition, you can't stop acting out the perception. And so what that implies is that at some direct level—and this is the science, not the philosophy—you don't see objects and infer meaning; you see meaning and infer objects.

And that's really something you can think about for like 40 years because it looks like it's true factually. And that's a strange thing too, right? It's a very strange claim to say that the facts support the notion that the primary object of perception is meaning, not objects. And I actually think that's an interpretation, though I won't go into that tonight. That's more in keeping with evolutionary logic than the idea that you perceive objects and infer meaning.

And so the stripping away of meaning metaphysically from the world of perception—that's a consequence of scientism—is actually predicated on something approximating bad science, and that's become increasingly evident, I would say, in the neurophysiology of perception. And that's an important field given that the problem of perception is the problem that has bedeviled both the sciences and the humanities and also in the engineering for that matter for the last 50 years.

And it has not only done that, it has produced this rivening of culture that's occurred within the universities partly because of the postmodernist claim and so fundamental postmodernist claims. Now, the first claim is that there's no canonical interpretation—that self-evidence—like, okay, fair enough, fair enough. That might be a claim emerging from literary departments, English literary departments, under the influence of French continental thought, let's say.

Um, I don't think you can take issue with that; I think it happens to be the case because the notion that there is a multiplicity of potentially valid interpretations is true. What isn't true is the idea that we use power and domination to solve that problem primarily. And there's no excuse philosophically from leaping from a mystery that's utterly profound, which is the problem of perception, to the conclusion that some pathological socially constructed process is therefore at the basis of the act of perception and categorization itself.

I think that's unforgivable cognitively, and it's cynical beyond belief and it's corrosive beyond our capacity to deal with it. I mean, you think about what that claim means. Is that the way you solve the—and that's like an implicit bias argument, by the way, just to make that clear as well—that you solve the problem of categorization by imposing your will to power on the world in some zero-sum, winner-take-all game of dominion and oppression?

It's like you could not, if you tried, you could not come up with a more cynical view of the mechanism that makes order habitable out of chaos. But what's sort of delightful about that in some sense is that it's just not true. It's literally—we could say scientifically, if we take scientifically to mean literally—we can say it's not true.

It actually turns out that even in the animal kingdom we know—you might think that the hierarchies that we use to orient ourselves in—that's part of the strategy that we use to guarantee our survival. You know, we fight tooth and nail with nature, red in claw, to climb the hierarchies of dominance as a consequence of our will to power. It's like, no, actually, that isn't how it works.

And so we all have this image, for many of us, I would say, have an image of chimpanzee troops, let's say our closest primate relative. We split from them in evolutionary terms about seven million years ago, something like that. You can calculate that quite accurately by looking at the mutation rate of genetic material that we share with chimps and calculate the average mutation rate and look at the propagation of mutations and the separation of them; you can get a pretty accurate estimate of the split. It's a long time ago.

Um, so we're pretty tightly related to chimpanzees and we know that—we all know that—the biggest, toughest, meanest male oppressive chimp rules the troop. It's like, no, wrong! Frans de Waal has studied dominance hierarchies—so-called dominance hierarchies—and that's an interesting issue. That is the term that’s most often used—dominance hierarchy—because you might ask as a very intelligent student of mine once did, just exactly where did that term come from, and how much political implication was loaded in that right from the beginning?

I thought about that for about five years. I thought it was an unbelievably—I mean that I thought it was an unbelievably acute observation. He was a very—he is a very acute fellow. So the brute chimpanzees, they have a pretty short tyrannical rule, and the reason for that is I don't care how big and tough and mean and dominant and oppressive you are, two slightly less mean, oppressive and dominant males can take you out pretty easily on a bad day.

And that's a real problem—you think about that biologically—that's a non-trivial problem. And so that is exactly what happens in chimpanzee troops is that the males who rise to a position of authority as a mere consequence of their psychopathic will to power rule very unstably over very unstable troops and have a very short ruling period.

Whereas the males that manage to—because in chimps, the fundamental hierarchy is male dominated. That's less obvious in another set of very close primate relatives, the bonobos—they're more female dominated, interestingly enough. And it isn't obvious which of those two species we're more like.

So, but I'll concentrate on the chimps now because we're talking a little bit about will to power. The males who manage to maintain a relatively stable coalition, let's say, are actually very affiliative. In fact, they groom other males more than any other males in the troop, and so they’re doing—they're using reciprocal altruism at least in part as the basis of their claim to dominion.

Now, they do have preferential mating access to females, and there's some analogy in that with what happens in the human case, but it's more complicated in the human case. In any case, they also tend to spend a fair bit of time attending to the females in the troop in a positive way and to their infants.

And so the more benevolent, but still physically able males seem to establish a stable social hierarchy that's quite unlike the social hierarchy that's produced by the, you know, more psychopathic, straight, you know, raw will to power.

And, well, here's another fact for what it’s worth. If the hierarchy that we use to aggregate the canon is fundamentally predicated on oppressive power, which is the claim, then why do psychopaths only constitute three percent of the population? And that's actually stable. And so there are good evolutionary biology psychology models of psychopathy—its emergence has been modeled quite nicely in computer simulations and such simulations can be used as appropriate models.

If the psychopath prevalence falls below one percent, there are so few of them that people get complacent in relationship to the possibility of malevolence. And so then they can flourish a bit, right? And their prevalence can rise in the population. But if it gets up to five percent, it's like everybody wakes up and it's not such a good day for the psychopaths when they do. And, uh, and somebody has to keep the malevolent types down.

You know, and that’s probably—possibly—possibly will say why women like men who are less agreeable than they are, you know? And women have to solve this very complex mating problem in relationship to men, which is there are bad men—there are really bad—and they're a minority of the population, and they tear their way through overly agreeable populations.

And to keep them from dominating, you need good men who are also capable of being quite terrible. And so that's appears to be the conundrum that women face when they're choosing male partners—one of the conundrums. They want someone who's strong enough to resist what's truly terrible, but benevolent and generous enough to—and productive enough to be productive and useful, but also agreeable and empathic enough to share.

And you can see that that's a terribly tight line, right? And women are always—well, young women tend to overshoot the mark on the malevolent side.

So, the psychopathic Machiavellians who mimic competent male behavior—they ape it, so to speak—are pre—differentially attractive to young and inexperienced women, whereas women who've had some experience get better at distinguishing the psychopathic Machiavellian pretenders, who often manifest a certain confidence and a certain bravado. They, uh, they get good at distinguishing them from the real thing.

And so it's a tricky thing for women to manage, and men can use deceptive strategies to mimic competence, which is exactly what deceptive strategies are for, obviously. And, and that's also a pathway to short-term mating success under some circumstances, and it's viable enough to propagate itself in the population, but it's not a good medium to long-term strategy.

And the question might be, well, what is a good medium to long-term strategy? And it looks like something—well, that is the question that's actually at the bottom of this entire talk because it's also the same question as what is the process that gives rise to perception itself. This is an attempt to integrate across a whole variety of complex questions.

So, you might ask yourself—this is where it gets difficult to tie all these things together— so let me see how I'm going to be able to do this. Yes, there’s no evidence, as far as I can tell, that the proposition that the fundamental motivation for categorization itself is the expression of power—that seems wrong. It's not stable.

So then the question is, well, what is exactly at the base of the process of perception and categorization? And so that would be really right at the basis of cognition itself, perhaps the essence of consciousness itself, and certainly the thing that acts at the interface between what is not yet known and what is going to be known, right? The active investigation that transforms what's unexpected and potentially dangerous into what's habitable, safe, competent, and secure.

I saw this opera, but you didn't think I was going there! I saw this opera in New York City about three weeks ago, opera written by a dead white male of the oppressive sort, uh, Wagner. And so he's sort of way up there on that list, man. And it was the opera "Die Meistersinger." And it was really interesting; the libretto was really interesting.

It really dovetailed, in a strange way, with the sorts of things I happen to be writing about at that point, and I'll just run through it quickly, and hopefully that will help tie together these strands that I’ve laid all over the place now.

So while music does that, right? It ties things together. Great art does that; it ties things together. And so—and it's part of the process by which we make order out of chaos, right? Great art, not power. Great art.

And you have to be so cynical that it beggars description and so envious of what's great to reflexively identify that with the will to power. I mean, really. That's what you think when you enter one of the great cathedrals or chapels that grace your campus? You think nothing but will to power erected that corrupt oppression?

And if you do think that, well, what do you think of yourself then? You think you're nothing but the expression of the corrupt will to power? Or you somehow circumvented that because of your moral piety? And, well in what case, in that case then, what is it you're relying on to orient yourself in the world?

It's something other than that will to power. Well, if so then exactly what it is? What is it? Well, you come to university to ally yourself with the forces of great art, let's say. And that's so much more powerful than mere power that they're not even in the same category.

Well, back to "Die Meistersinger." So it's a very interesting opera because it's set in Nuremberg. In Nuremberg, in the opera there are these guilds of men and they're all craftsmen. And so one of the heroes of the story—there are two heroes and a heroine in the story—he's a cobbler, and he's a really good cobbler. And you think, well, he's just a cobbler.

It's like, it was so funny because when I went to see this opera, my shoes were—they didn’t fit! I had these shoes that I hadn't really paid attention to for like three years, and my feet were just killing me.

And I was in this opera, and it emphasized the absolute moral necessity of attending to your shoes properly. And I thought, huh, isn’t that synchronous, we'll say? And it certainly was. And now I have shoes that fit; although they're still, these are somewhat ugly, but they do at least fit so I partially solved the problem.

In any case, "Die Meistersinger" is the master singer. And so these men that are all extremely skilled craftsmen—so they're people who have skill, right, at the level of the interface with the world—they get together in guilds of their own type and then they also practice singing. And one of them, who's a skilled craftsman, because that's a prerequisite, is elected as a master singer.

And so each of these guilds have master singers, and now and then they elect a new master singer. And all the master singers get together to elect a new master singer. I was thinking about this little trope; I'd already written down in the book I’m writing while I was watching this.

You see this and if you watch American sports films, you know, so there's a football team, and after overcoming great odds, the quarterback, who's probably, you know, risen above his suffering in some manner, triumphantly produces the victory. And all the other football players put him up on their shoulders and lead them out of the stadium, and everybody's standing up and cheering and then he has an affair with his girlfriend, the top cheerleader, and everyone leaves happily ever after.

And that's the same motif as the Meister singer, right? It's really interesting. You know, that the men will put that other man on their shoulders. It's not—that's not a good long-term mating strategy that, right, to elevate him above you in that sort of competition.

But men do that all the time! Interestingly enough, in "Die Meistersinger," the men in the guilds come together and a new entrant onto the potential master stinger stage comes into the town. And he's a knight and he's wandered through nature and he sings of nature, but he's completely undisciplined; he doesn’t know any of the rules.

And so he’s not a master craftsman like these craftsmen, but he wants to be a master singer. Simultaneously, one of the other leaders of the guilds offers his entire fortune and the hand of his daughter to the new master singer. And you think, well, that's a pretty patriarchal trope, but it's actually handled extraordinarily brilliantly, I think, within the confines of the opera because she is the heroine of the story.

And although her father is offering her one of the masters, she has the right of choice. And it's not sort of—it’s clearly part of the opera that she has the choice, and she falls in love with this knight. It's hardly a surprise, but women are perverse like that.

But the master singers—they don't know what to do with this guy because he's unbelievably gifted in terms of his talent, but he's not a master. He’s not a craftsman; he hasn't gone through the disciplinary process that would mold him into someone who's thoroughly united right from the bottom of the craft to the tip of the head.

And so they’re thrown into disarray by this and also by the fact that this woman—her instinct drives her towards him. And so they did degenerate—the men's skills degenerate into kind of an internecine squabble and it's complicated by the fact that the woman also kind of like some of the other master singers, they're older, they're competent, and so they have a shot at her hand.

And so they fall into disarray under the stress of this mating competition. We could say that biologically. And the cobbler, who's the paramount hero in the story, who the woman loves, but perhaps not as much as the knight, and he's old—he’s like 55. So he’s younger than me, but he's too old, you know? This is a young woman.

And so he decides he’s going to train this young knight, and that's pretty damn interesting, you know? Because he thinks the moral thing to do here is to take myself out of the competition and to raise this untutored but extraordinarily talented young man to a position of primacy to unite nature and culture simultaneously in his form and to help him attain the status of master singer.

And his name is Johann Sachs—and Johann is John, and he's John the Baptist and I'm not just inventing that; it's not just my patriarchal power-driven inference on the multiplicity of potential meanings in the text because Wagner basically says that in the libretto a few times in case you don't catch it the first time.

And so in some manner, this knight is Christ, and that's a strange thing, but you know you can understand it, right? It doesn’t, it’s not like it doesn’t make sense in some sense because Christ is always presented as a superordinate ideal.

And obviously this new master singer, who unites the melody of nature and the discipline of culture, is a master of his craft by divine grace because of his talent but also now because Hans Sachs—it's Hans Sachs, that’s Johann, that's John the Baptist—decides to train him. And so now he's a model of discipline and craft, and that’s allied with natural talent and that gives a whole new depth to his voice because now that natural talent has been properly brought under a disciplined structure, which is a reflection of the guild structure of the entire Meister singer contest.

And suffice it to say that Sachs pulls himself out of the race and decides to sacrifice himself in some sense for this young man and the woman chooses the knight. And the knight undergoes this disciplinary regimen and then he sings in the contest, and all the master singers can now, um, what would you say? Live comfortably with their conscience and they elect him to the highest position, and then Sachs and the knight and the woman are celebrated.

It's lovely, brilliant! And then, of course, it's set to this remarkable music, and watch all these people who spent all these years disciplining themselves in some unbelievably difficult manner to play their instruments properly and to interact with each other harmoniously and to play while they're doing it, so that it's not just rote and to produce this magnificent stage in this ridiculously impressive building in this unbelievably impressive city and all these people come there and devote your attention to watching this—well, why?

Why indeed? Well, that master singer spirit, that's what solves the problem of perception. It's not raw power, right? It's not a corrupt will; it's not a satanic force—exactly the opposite of that.

And you know, we all know that. We all know that although we don’t know we know it. You know, I was in the chapel the other day here, which one was it? You have two remarkable chapels—well, more than two, but two particularly remarkable chapels.

Um, doesn’t matter really. Up on the pinnacle of the chapel interior, there’s a picture of Christ and it’s like a Byzantine representation. He’s in a mandola, which is a shape that Freudians can have no shortage of fun with, and, uh, he’s shining forth from this background and he’s placed above the sky, right? Or on the sky.

And you see this even more clearly in Byzantine church architecture. So the cathedral is a cross, and then at the central point of the cross, so that's the point of maximal suffering, right? That's what's being illustrated in the architecture; there's a dome. And the dome is—how about—it's the sky. It's not that hard to figure out.

And the cathedral structure is trees, and so it’s a representation of our primordial environment—this ancient forest, right?—which is now recreated in stone with this dome that's above all that's centered at the point of the cross, which is the point of maximal suffering.

And you look up into the sky, the starry firmament, and what do you see reflected back down to you? You see this image of the divine word—that's what you see. You might not even know that you're seeing that. You don't know you're in a forest; you don't know you're seeing the sunlight filter through the branches, you know? Our ancestral home for millions, tens of millions of years.

You don't see the immense labor and effort that it took to erect that cathedral and to put that image in its highest place. At least she dressed like a lobster, so that was good actually. And as far as protests go, relatively witty, although perhaps somewhat ill-timed.

So here's a way of thinking about that. So I've been discussing a series of images with my wife and one of them is an image of Mary and it's a very—it was a renaissance image that was painted by many, many people.

And, uh, it's funny, I'm going to talk about the divine feminine after that interruption. Um, Mary is often represented with her head surrounded by stars and with her foot on a serpent on the world, right? And so well, what is that exactly—that image?

Well it's something like, what is it to have your head in the stars, let's say? Well, you know, when you—I bought this cottage up north in Northern Canada and it's very dark up there and you can go on to the dock at night and it's dark enough so you can see the Milky Way, you know? And it has to be pretty dark before you can see the Milky Way, and it's very impressive.

You know what that's like, if you've—you know—to see the night sky, or maybe you see it, feel the same way when you see the Grand Canyon, or a remarkable waterfall, or some particularly beautiful scene, or perhaps you feel that way in a cathedral, or more likely, you feel that way when you're listening to music that really grips you, right?

It's all the same experience—the experience of awe. And it's way down low in your nervous system like the orienting reflex. It's not a cognitive response precisely; it's a precognitive emotional response that signifies significance.

And you look up at the night sky, and it fills you with a sense of awe, but it doesn't just do that. You see it activates the impulse to imitate, which is a very deep motivation in human beings. We're unbelievable mimics; we mimic each other all the time, which is why we all use the same words, let's say.

We're very good at embodying other people's embodiments. It's a particular talent that human beings have, and we're so good at that we imitate all sorts of things that aren't even human. And so then you view this expansive night sky, and a sense of awe fills you as you confront the infinite.

It calls to something inside of you that can master the infinite, and that's a form of imitation, right? To look into the darkest place, the most wide expanse possible, and to have something inside you respond that's capable of dealing with that—that's that instinct to imitate.

And that's calling the best out of you, and that's why you love doing that. And it isn’t just that you love it; it’s that you cannot live without it. You cannot live without it. And I know so many of you—atheist or otherwise—you can't live without music. You think, why can you not live without music and what is it calling to precisely?

You know that remarkable interplay of harmonious patterns because that's what music is and that's what the world is—it's not objects; it's the harmonious interplay of patterns. And music reflects that, and then you warrant yourself in your embodied manner to those patterns and dance along with the world and that revivifies you.

And if you're particularly good at it, well maybe you’ll also attract a mate. And you want a mate that doesn't detect attempt to dominate you sexually during the introductory dance, right? You want a mate who will play along with you and match your movements to theirs so that you can see that there's a harmonious interplay between the two of you as you meet in play, soul to soul, if you can manage it.

And everyone knows that, and that capacity that's called out in the dance is the same capacity that's called out by the night sky, and it's the same thing that's represented in those Byzantine churches. You look deep enough into infinity, and you find your destiny—and that destiny is everything you could be.

And we all know that because—and this is what men and women search for in each other—you know if you're rejected by a woman, well, why is she rejecting you? Well, maybe her judgment is off and that would be very, what would you say, convenient for you.

But she's rejecting you because you are not all that you could be and maybe not even all that you need to be. And so that's a very painful rejection and it causes all sorts of tension between men and women.

But you know women have a lot at stake in this game, and so they're looking for something powerful, dominating, brutal, terrible—no, something perhaps capable of that, but even more important, capable of mastering it, right? And capable of singing despite that.

We all know that's true, and the shame that men feel when they're rejected by women is precisely the shame that they feel at knowing deep in their heart that they have not lived up to what they are capable of being.

And that harsh judgment that women lay on men, which by the way is part of our sexual evolution, because we were shaped by sexual selection, which by the way is the operation of consciousness on the structures of matter at the most basic possible level.

Well, it's a terrible rejection, but it's a salutary rejection. And that process of differentiated choice has shaped us into what we are—that action of consciousness wanting the best from a potential partner and selecting at least in part on that basis.

And men participate in that too, in the Meister singer manner. You know, men aren't competing for dominance with each other constantly in a zero-sum game to achieve sexual dominance. There's an element of that, right? Because some things are a zero-sum game.

But men are perfectly capable and more than willing, in fact, to aggregate themselves into skilled groups and to celebrate the elevation of the most skilled above all else. And so we see this cooperative venture between men and women over the longest run of possible time in producing some refinement of the human spirit in embodied form.

And we want that from everyone. We require that from everyone. We're thrilled to the core of our soul when we encounter it in a conversation or in a course or in a work of art that calls to us in that manner. We need to know this increasingly; we need to know all this consciously, you know?

We've acted it out; we've produced images to represent it. It's lurking there in some sense, and it's not the satanic power of corrupt oppression—not fundamentally. That's a far weaker force than that which can overcome it.

And everything around us would be nothing but hell if that's all there was, and everything around us is not only hell. You know, for fragile and broken creatures ignorant to the core we don't do too badly. And people are capable of nobility, especially under the duress of suffering—that’s virtually miraculous when you encounter it.

And it's so heartening to see that. And you've seen it in the people that you love when they're going through terrible trials. You know, people become corrupt and embittered by their catastrophes and it’s no wonder, but certainly in the main that’s not the fundamental human response. The fundamental human response is keep calm and carry on, you know, and good on you for that!

So, well, to sum up, let’s say we solve the power of perception with the divine word—that's how it is. And what does that mean? Well, it means truth! Every word a prayer, right? Every word of groping to find a firm foundation to stand on while you make your way through life.

And every time you hear a conversation of that sort or hear yourself participating in that prayerful process, orienting yourself to this highest uniting good and using that to govern your utterance—it's balm for the soul. Yeah, it's love that guides that.

And love is the desire to work for the betterment of all things, and that's the proper orienting response we could say. And it's truth nested inside of that, and that's how it is and that's how it should be and that's how it may forever be.

[Applause]

[Music]