Psychedelics, Consciousness, and AI | Richard Dawkins | EP 256

Hello everyone! A while back, and that would be November of 2021, I had the distinct pleasure of having a discussion with Dr. Richard Dawkins, who, apart from being an esteemed evolutionary biologist and theorist, is also one of the world's foremost atheists.

We danced back and forth for quite a while on Gmail before agreeing to meet, and our meeting, I think, was really productive.

So, I have a recording of it, audio only, as was the agreement, and it starts rather abruptly as we entered right into a discussion and ends abruptly in a sense, too, because we ran out of our time without running out of topics. I walked over to, aha, as it turned out, a chapel on the Oxford campus, and that wasn't the place that Dr. Dawkins wanted to go with me. So that's where it ended.

In any case, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I found him charming, erudite, and intelligent, and a man of good will, and I really enjoyed the conversation. So I hope you enjoy it too, and I hope that there's more of it because we have a lot more to talk about. I feel that way, and I think perhaps he did by the end of our conversation. So enjoy. [Music]

Almost a hundred percent of the conversations that I have with people on the street are very, very positive. I would say it’s one in five thousand that isn’t.

Yes, but he's only a sex one. Yes, and there's no shortage of, yeah, trouble. What's the motivation of the few who are hostile? That's a good question, isn't it? Because you could think about that as sort of a general metaphysical question. You know, what’s the motivation of the few who are truly hostile? I think often they have me confused with a figment of their imagination. Sure, you know.

So when I, you sent me one of your papers on biological sex, well stating what you stated in that paper is already enough in the current world to make you very unpopular with a certain class of people, regardless of why you think what you think or what your reasons are.

When all this first exploded around me, I had released a couple of YouTube videos, three of them I think, decrying Bill C-16 that was passed by the Canadian Parliament, which mandated pronoun use. And for me, it had nothing to do with the transgender issue—or maybe it did peripherally as a political issue, you know, and maybe as a psychological issue because the transgender issue is very complicated if you're a psychopathologist—but for me it was just compelled speech.

It's like I don't care what your reason is; I am not saying the words I am legally obligated to say.

And the case I made on YouTube was, well first, the American Supreme Court had made compelled voluntary speech; they declared it unconstitutional in 1942. And second, there was never a common law jurisdiction in the entire world that ever compelled speech for any reason.

Is Canada the only country that does this? That does this? That’s a good question. I don’t know. I know the United States doesn’t. Yes, we’ve also had this encounter, this proliferation of these so-called human rights commissions, which are like a quasi-judicial inquisition system that has been taken over completely by the woke types.

And so there was a restaurant in Vancouver quite recently where the man who owned it, although he seemed to have done backflips to satisfy this angry hypothetically transgender individual he’d employed, he was fined something like $35,000 and forced to take this, you know, these mandatory sensitivity training programs.

Is this in Canada? That’s in Canada—Vancouver’s major city on the west coast—and so, you know, I was assured when I voiced my opposition, and I said, well, this is illegal, and they said, well, nothing will happen if you don’t comply. And I thought, well, the hell with that! What do you mean nothing will happen and it’s illegal?

Yes, quite. No, nothing will happen. So how can you possibly say nothing will happen? But that wasn’t the point for me either.

Well, I made these videos at the same time I made a video because the University of Toronto was implementing mandatory racial sensitivity training, and I know the literature pertaining to the implicit association test, let’s say, which is the test that all these half-wit HR types use to diagnose your implicit bias. And then they want to train you with explicit training techniques to reduce your bias, which can't work if their theory is correct because it takes mass practice to change or eliminate implicit bias.

And then there's no evidence whatsoever that the training programs work, and some evidence that they're actually counterproductive. And the implicit association test, which is essentially used as a diagnostic instrument, has neither the predictive validity nor the test-retest reliability to be used in an ethical manner as a diagnostic test, which I also said in these videos.

And so that caused a lot of trouble, and I didn't really expect it, you know.

Well, why should you? It’s perfectly reasonable. I just want to say I admire your courage in speaking out about this because a huge number of people, including me, totally agree with you, and many, many of them are just too frightened to say so because they have been intimidated.

There’s massive intimidation going on, especially in the academic world. Yeah, and you’re one of the few people who’s actually stood up to this intimidation, and I wish to salute you.

Well, thanks for that. That’s very much appreciated.

Well, I understand because I’ve studied it a lot why people are intimidated, you know. I’ve talked to conservative politicians all over Canada and the United States. Although I also talk to, particularly in the states, moderate Democrat types a lot. But the conservatives, especially in Canada, they’re absolutely terrified that if they make any conservative pronouncements, they’ll be singled out and mobbed, and it’s unbelievably unpleasant.

I mean, not to mention potentially dangerous. I mean, I was careful in what I did. I worked as a clinician for 20 years, and I helped people negotiate unbelievably stressful situations, you know, where their careers were on the line, where their families were on the line, their sanity was on the line.

I got very good at figuring out how to step through such minefields, you know, strategically and carefully. And so by the time I said something, I had three sources of independent income. So I had a clinical practice, and I had a company that was generating a certain amount of money, and I had my university position.

And so I didn’t think that, you know, I was fairly well-insulated. I thought because when I said I wouldn’t do this, I meant there is no bloody way you’re going to make me do this no matter what you do.

And I thought that through all the way to the bottom. You know, could lose my job? Yeah, I can live with that. Could lose my clinical practice? Yeah, I could live with that. What about jail?

Well, probably won’t come to that, but put me in jail and see what happens. And so I meant no, and I meant no more than they meant yes. And that’s part of the reason it caused such a stir, I would say.

But many of the clients I dealt with, you know, they’d be under pressure to conform ideologically in the workplace, and be pressured badly, and, you know, they had families to support, mortgages to pay, and it was... I wouldn’t say easier for them exactly to go along, you know, step by step, or even microstep by microstep than to stand up and risk being taken out.

If I was in my clinical practice, if someone needed to stand up in the workplace to a bullying boss, say, or to an ideological cadre, which was very frequently the case in the corporate world, we’d get their CV or resume in order and make sure it was polished up, and if they had any educational faults that needed to be rectified to make them marketable, we’d address that.

And then they’d apply for different jobs, and they’d go on a few interviews so they were ready, and then they could go in. And we did that often too when I was helping people negotiate for a raise.

It’s like get yourself ready, you know so you can go in there and tell your boss why you’re valuable, or you can go in there and tell your boss why they better get the hell off your case or they’re either gonna lose you or there’s gonna be trouble.

But man, you have to prepare for that. And so you see in the academia, and in the corporate workplace, and in the entertainment industry now, which is absolutely corrupted by this sort of thing: 300,000 micro retreats and here we are.

So what’s a micro retreat?

Okay, so I’m sitting in a faculty meeting at the University of Toronto and the administration announces that they’re going to increase the size of our fourth-year seminars by a factor of two. We don’t have enough faculty; we actually don’t have enough money to hire more faculty. Well, that’s because you spent all the money on administrators over the last 20 years.

Here’s the data that pertain to that but that’s beside the point. So would it be okay if you just, you know, had twice as many people in your fourth-year seminar?

Well, that’s a crowning seminar for the students, and a seminar with 40 people in it isn’t a seminar; it’s another class.

And so I tell my faculty conference, “Why don’t you just say no? Like no, we’re not doing this.”

“Well, we won’t get what we want.”

“Well, you may have noticed that when you’ve been dealing with the administration for the last 20 years, they make all sorts of plans and often you’re consulted, and then none of the plans come to fruition, and then they implement something that has nothing to do with what you want, all the time, and all of you know that because it’s happened to you.”

Yeah, well, you know, we have to go along with them.

Okay, well, so then what happened?

You know, what happened? I don’t know if it happened here at Oxford, but in North American universities, the administrative load—like a parasite load—and I think the biological metaphor is exactly apt, by the way—exploded over the last 40 years.

Universities have eaten up 70 cents of every dollar that the American federal government pumped into student aid. It’s almost all gone into the hands of administrators. The faculty numbers haven’t grown in a commensurate manner with the student numbers and so the administration took over.

Well, and then because they were composed of the same sort of people that the faculty were, who did all these micro retreats when the diversity, equity, and inclusivity people started to invade the administration, they just did the same thing.

And so here we are.

Well, I think we agree about this, so we get on to whatever it is you want to talk about today.

Yes, yes, yes! Well, I’d like to talk to you about your paper, the one you sent me about the organism as a model.

Yes! Okay, yeah, um, if you don’t mind, because I’d like to, I guess what I was curious about, because I didn’t find anything in that paper that I disagreed with at all, I thought, yeah, that’s—and I know a little bit about the engineering literature that suggests that, and even the computational literature that suggests that in some sense an organism that operates within the world has to be a model of that world, yes, in order for it to be—in order for it to be operated in the world.

Yes, and then you detailed out all sorts of real-world examples including, well, let’s say stick insects where, you know, not only are they a model of the world but they look just like the world, yes.

And animals in winter versus summer changing their coats, and birds of course—you said you could derive the structure of the atmosphere and probably the earth’s gravitational field and probably the strength of the gravitational field by a sufficiently detailed analysis of the bird.

Very good, I hadn’t noticed that one; that’s very good.

Yeah, oh well, you did mention the air aspect with birds anyways, but I’m sure you could.

I’m sure you could generalize that.

Yes, well good! I’m glad you like that. It’s a book I’m now working on called The Genetic Book of the Dead, which is all about the idea that the animal is a model of not the present but the past ancestral worlds, yes, because the animal’s genes have been filtered through a long series of environments.

So the genome is a palimpsest of ancient environments—more recent—more recently still, very, very recent—including extremely recent.

And then we go out of the genome and the nervous system becomes part of the palimpsest—recent experience, right?

So you could say that, so correct me if I ever put words in your mouth because I want to get what you think.

Yes, exactly right. The genetic code is a repository of information that generates every, perhaps ever more complex, or ever more fine-grained… Not trying to say that…

All I wanted to say is that the genetic code is a decodable description of ancient environments.

Right, right.

Okay, fair enough. So the question then, I suppose, would be at what level of resolution, right?

Yes, and there’s this idea—I think I mentioned in my talk the other day—I really like this idea, and when I talk about religious matters, by the way, I try to speak metaphorically and psychologically and to tread on ground that might be theological only when that’s absolutely necessary and never if I can possibly manage it.

So I like to think about things in psychological and biological terms and physical terms for that matter wherever possible; it keeps things clearer and simpler.

But there is this idea—in relationship to the idea of the incarnation—that Christ could embody God through a process of kenosis.

And the Scholastic theoreticians who made this case because they were trying to account for how the entire cosmos, you might say, could fit in one body.

And the idea was, well, there was an emptying of God. And when I was reading that in relationship to heuristic processing and also to the idea of low-resolution representations in computational simulation and in relationship to this idea that an animal has to be the model of the world, I thought, well, you kind of want to also be an unbiased model of the world, right?

So if you make a thumbnail, this is a good way of thinking about it. I think a computer thumbnail is a good model of essentially a two-dimensional slice of the world, right?

So it’s a low-resolution image, and if it’s an—the interesting thing about a low-resolution image is that it’s an unbiased sample of the color space of the image, right?

It doesn’t have an ideological bent; part of the reason it’s an accurate representation is—and this has to do with that idea of redundancy that you developed in your paper—so if I took a picture of that wall which is basically white, the picture is going to be white. It’s not going to be as varied in its whiteness as the actual wall, but it’s going to be an unbiased, random, essentially random sample of the whiteness of that wall.

And so it can stand in for it in a manner that’s unbiased. And a lot of, I think, our internal representations are—I like to use the terminology low resolution because it implies this—it is also associated in some sense with the idea of a compression algorithm in computation.

Because what a compression algorithm does is it reduces redundancy, and all that’s stored as information is the non-redundant information, and you can usually take something quite complex, and if it has regularities in it, as you pointed out in the paper, then you can abstract the regularities and just represent them.

And it’s interesting; it’s really interesting, actually, because with some compression algorithms, some get rid of data, but some—and they don’t compress quite as tightly—some allow you to recreate the entire original from the compression because there is genuine redundancy in the external world.

So the kenosis idea—part of the reason I’m interested in this—and I was extremely interested in the fact that when we first had our emails back and forth before we decided to meet, I suggested that we meet and that I would like that, and you sent me an email and you said, “I suspect you want to talk about this.”

And I thought it was remarkable to me that you picked that particular paragraph because that was exactly why I wanted to talk to you, and it was, I think, probably the most clearly I’d ever stated that particular idea.

And so that was quite… I’d forgotten what that was.

Well, it has to do with what we’re talking about, to some degree. The question is if the human being is a model of the environment, what exactly is being modeled?

So because you might ask, well, what exactly is the environment? And that’s where I think we could have a very fruitful exchange of views.

Now, the stick insect has obviously been shaped to a massive degree by natural selection because it looks like a stick. But I’m very curious about the role of sexual selection because that makes things weirdly complicated, especially among human beings.

Because first of all, sexual selection can result in runaway processes—like I think I might have read this in your book, the Irish elk story.

Yes. Yes, yeah! So and some people have suggested—maybe it was you because I read your books a long time ago—that, you know, they stuck—many people have suggested that at least one of the mechanisms that drove our rapid cortical evolution was stringent sexual selection primarily applied by females to males.

I think that might be Geoffrey Miller who suggested that.

Okay! And so what do you think? If sexual selection is one of the processes that really drove our rapid divergence away from our chimpanzee human shared relative, then part of what we modeled as a consequence of that sexual selection is whatever women wanted.

And so then the question is what exactly is it that’s driving human female sexual selection? And that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about because that would be incorporated in us as a model; you know if women are looking for a kind of ideal, let’s say, in a mate, then as they exercise their hypergamous choice, the male is going to come to ever more closely approximate that ideal—whatever it is—and that’s going to be an implicit ideal because none of that’s conscious, obviously.

Yes, it seems to me you keep wandering from one subject to another without sticking to one at a time. I mean, we came—we went to kenosis, and I kind of wonder what that’s got to do with anything.

And then it’s—it's probably some difference in our thinking style, you know.

I think, well, one of the… would you say you're more interested in ideas or aesthetics?

Ideas.

Okay, that's what I would have guessed. Yes, I'm probably more somewhat more interested in aesthetics, although it's close.

And part of the way that would be reflected in our thinking styles is that I would think in a more—in a style that has a more loose associational structure.

That's right.

I mean let me take one example of something that I’ve seen of yours, which is it’s not nothing with sexual selection. You once showed in a lecture a picture of snakes spiraling around each other.

Oh yes! And you said something like, I think it’s positively, you know, that that is the representation of DNA.

Yes, we could—let's leave that one. But I promise I will return to that.

Well there’s a rough time because that seems to me to go to the heart of what may be a difference between us this aesthetic—I mean that idea that in some sense represents DNA, to me to be complete nonsense.

Okay, I will... I will absolutely address that.

Okay, God! Well, this is something I did want to talk to you about.

Okay, it does take us rather far down the rabbit hole, though I would be— I would say.

Okay, well I think it may be fundamental to our difference.

That’s fine, that’s fine. I’m more than happy to address it.

And people have called me out on that a lot, you know.

I actually threw that in a lecture because I was thinking in a loosely associative way about some very complicated things, and I was struck by this—this recurrence of the double helix pattern, yes, and cultural representations all over the place, you love symbols—I mean, you’re obsessed with symbols, yes.

You’re almost drunk on symbols, and you could say that—I think you got to stop and say what does it actually mean to say?

Absolutely, and the snakes trining is one thing; there are others, but that would be a very good one to try to nail down.

Yeah, well, you know part of the—we could talk about technically for a moment, you know, because I think it is a difference in thinking style, and I think one of the reasons that your writing is so appealing to people, including me, is that your language is very precise.

It's very obvious what you mean when you say a given word, you know, and some of the psychologists that I’ve really admired, like Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a great book on the neuropsychology of anxiety, like if you’re interested in the idea of modeling, that’s I think that’s the most profound neuroscience text that’s ever been written.

I haven’t read that, I confess.

I used to know Jeffrey Gray, but I haven’t read it.

It’s a great book, yes, and it integrates cybernetic theory and animal experimental work, and neurophysiology, and the function of emotion. Like it’s a really good book, and it does—it is centrally concerned with the idea of modeling.

Because Gray worked—see in your paper and I’ll get to the DNA thing, I promise you—okay in your paper you talk about the response of a single cell to the repeated to a repeated identical stimulus.

Okay? Sokolov, who was one of the great Russian neuropsychologists, identified the orienting reflex as the manifestation of the habituation phenomenon at the highest level of nervous system organization.

So for example, if I put headphones on you and then I hook you to a galvanometer, and I play, say, I play a middle C at exactly the same volume one second apart, 40 times, okay?

So what will happen is when you first hear it, there’ll be a change in skin response, and then the second time you hear it, a slightly smaller change until it will habituate completely—zero response—but then if you change the volume or the pitch or the space between the tones, or interestingly enough if you skip a tone where the tone should have been and there’s silence—lovely!

You’ll get an orange!

I like that, great.

Okay, now out of that, the Russians hypothesized that you build an internal model, which is exactly what you say in that paper, and then your nervous system searches for deviations from the model.

And then your consciousness is oriented towards the deviation, and it’s oriented by a deep instinct—like literally an instinct.

So for example, if you’re walking down the road, you have a map of the environment. Imagine that there’s a loud clattering noise behind you. You’ll stop, and this is all involuntary.

It’s driven by extremely low-level nervous system mechanisms. So you orient towards the place of maximal novelty, and then you do rapid visual exploration to try to rehabituate yourself to the environment.

And then if it’s, you know, a tradesman’s truck bumped you, map that onto regularities you already know, and you continue onward.

But all of that’s mediated by emotion. So anxieties—literally, we wrote a paper on this, was one of the papers I’m most happy with—that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy. That’s what it does.

So you can map anxiety right down to, well, you can map it right down to the level of entropy, yes?

So, anyways, Gray also mapped the emotions neuropharmacologically and neurophysiologically onto the orienting reflex and then he identified the brain areas.

So the hippocampus—the hippocampus is extremely metabolically active; it’s extremely expensive to operate psychophysiologically. It’s very susceptible to oxygen deprivation and brain damage.

The hippocampus moves information from short-term attention to long-term memory, and it’s crucially involved in the analysis and inhibition of that orienting response.

And you could also think, too, that this movement of orientation, in some sense, your whole brain is set up to inhibit that.

And so, here’s an interesting corollary of that: one of the things that psychedelics seem to do is to disinhibit—you called it lateral inhibition—there’s also a phenomenon called latent inhibition, which is the inhibiting effect of the memory of the regularities on your current perception.

And so when you look at the world, mostly what you see is memory, and that’s been tracked in the visual system.

So, you know, there are these visual primitives like line detection, but if you look at the layers of the visual system and you look at the bottom layer where the retinal cells first make contact with the visual cortex, there are more top-down inputs from the cortex into that low level than there are retinal inputs.

So even at the level of initial detection, most of what you see is memory, and that memory inhibits the novelty response.

And the novelty response—this is part of the reason I got interested in mystical experience, the novelty response—is twofold. It’s not just anxiety; it’s also exploratory curiosity.

And that’s because when there’s something novel, well, you have to be careful because God only knows what it might be like. It might be the thing that kills you; it might be nothing.

So anxiety freezes you, but the hypothalamus, which sits right on top of the spinal cord and is the highest integrating center of the instinctual responses of the motor system—it’s way pre-cortical—it’s divided into two parts, and one part of it governs the dopaminergic system that mediates incentive reward.

So all positive emotion, but, more importantly, active exploration.

And so what happens if you hit something that’s novel in relationship to the notions of preconceived regularities? Positive emotion is disinhibited; that’s exploration, and negative emotion is disinhibited simultaneously, and there’s a man named Rudolf Otto who wrote a book called—oh, I can’t remember the name of the book but it’s not Varieties of Religious Experience because that’s—James.

Anyways, he described the primordial act of perception as “numinous mysterium tremendous,” and it’s a combination of positive and negative emotion.

And I thought that’s pre-latent inhibition perception. Psychedelics disinhibit latent inhibition of perception, and that’s why they produce a mystical experience.

But the mystical experience—I mean there’s three aspects to it, let’s say. There’s an overwhelming positive emotion simultaneously; there’s overwhelming negative emotion.

So, and that’s like an awe experience and then there’s the disinhibition of fantasy simultaneously, which is something like the attempt to map that, and so people find that.

Well, absolutely overwhelming, but by definition, you know it—yes, it is overwhelming literally!

Now, you might say—I’m going to answer that snake question; that’s what I’m trying to do. You know, I studied one symbol, which was the Scandinavian world tree symbol.

And so the Scandinavians thought that there was a tree at the center of the cosmos. They called that Yggdrasil, and on the outside of the tree, there’s a snake that eats its own tail.

Now the Amazonian jungle dwellers who discovered ayahuasca have the same image. It’s exactly the same; it’s a tree at the center of the cosmos with a snake that eats its own tail.

Now, ayahuasca is a very bizarre chemical, and no one has any idea how the natives synthesized it to—Iowa.

Ayahuasca is a combination of DMT, which is an extremely powerful hallucinogenic that only lasts 10 minutes, and a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which makes the DMT experience last eight hours, because monoamine oxidase inhibitors stop the breakdown of DMT, which is a monoamine.

The Amazonians had to find these two plants that were widely separated geographically out of like hundreds of thousands of plants, and they had to mix them together, and they had to boil them properly for a certain amount of time to make ayahuasca.

Well, they’ve been using ayahuasca probably for like 15,000 years now. The Scandinavians didn’t use ayahuasca—the ones who came up with the world tree.

Thousand years for 15,000 years, yeah, in Amazonia—in the jungles. Well, they got there about 15,000 years ago, now maybe, you know, we don’t know how long it took them to discover it, but you know in most of those relatively primordial and small tribal groups, the pattern is unbroken oral tradition.

Like they’re not transformative societies; they do pretty much what their ancestors did.

So once you have a phenomenon which is something in common between Scandinavian and Amazonia, do you have an explanation for that?

Yes, I mean, is—well, I would say the archetypes you’re talking about now.

Well, we won’t get to that yet because, like I said, and I’m sure you would appreciate this, we want to keep things as much on the ground as possible.

Yes, yes. Okay, well, so it’s not unreasonable to note that a particular chemical might have the same effect on widely distributed people, right?

So, okay, so you’d expect constancy of response to a pharmacological agent rather than variants.

Yes, and that’s even true with the psychedelics and psilocybin, for example. Almost all the psychedelics have a very similar chemical structure; it’s a peculiar ring structure, but it’s similar to LSD, psilocybin, DMT—the classic hallucinogens.

Psilocybin tends to produce a type of vision that has a fair bit of commonality across cultures, and you can think about that as well; it’s the psychophysiological effect of the drug.

Now, it’s weird because it has this emotional effect, and this disinhibition of emotion can go two ways, because people have heavenly experiences, say—that’s almost complete disinhibition of positive emotion—or they can have bad trips.

That’s hell, essentially. That’s complete disinhibition of negative emotion, and a lot of that seems to depend on the context within which they have the experience.

So if there’s a lot of negative things happening in that context, that can be magnified by the experience, and things can go like horribly sideways.

That accounted for a lot of what happened badly in the psychedelic explosion in the U.S. in the 60s, and that was precipitated by the discovery of LSD.

And also there was a man, a mycologist who was a banker who went into Mexico, and found a woman practicing shaman who used psilocybin mushrooms, and she agreed to let them try them, and that was one of the soma.

He wrote a very famous book on Amanita muscaria; I can’t remember his name at the moment.

Wassau! That was Wassau! He was the first person who introduced psilocybins and psilocybin mushrooms into Western culture, and like we weren’t ready for any of that.

And certainly we were ready for LSD. These are unbelievably powerful pharmacological. LSD, I think, is the most psychoactive chemical ever found by an order of magnitude; it just takes a few million molecules to produce an intense psychedelic experience.

In any case, sorry, this is complicated. The ancient Scandinavians either used Amanita muscaria—those are red mushrooms with the white dots that you see in fairy tales all the time, the same color as Santa Claus and his flying reindeer, and reindeer like Amanita muscaria mushrooms, by the way.

And it sort of flies, even weirdly enough.

But I think the Scandinavians also used psilocybin.

Now the question is, what the hell’s that tree if you take it seriously? And should take it seriously.

I mean these images were used for a very, very long time, and people thought about them very hard.

So imagine that—well, first of all, you could imagine that the tree has this resonance as a sacred item partly because we’ve had a relationship with trees for maybe 60 million years.

You know, our ancestors lived in trees for a long time, and you know, you hear these psychologists talk about the African Veldt as our like uber environment, you know that we’re adapted to.

It’s like, well, it kind of depends on your time frame, you know that’s five million years, trees—that’s like 50 million years, so the notion of the tree, that’s in there, and all of our cathedrals have a tree-like architecture and that the light through the stained glass windows—that’s sunlight through the glass—there are trees all over the world too?

Yes, surprising that they would come into people’s hearts and symbolism.

Yes, but there’s a conceptual reason, see, because I think—and this is speculation; I know it’s speculation; I understand this perfectly well—it’s clear that our consciousness can move up and down levels of analysis to some degree and layers of nervous system creation and repair.

So imagine when you’re writing, you can attend to a letter or a word or phrase or a sentence or a paragraph, or you can move your level of apprehension up and down from the micro level to the more macro level.

And you know at the highest level of your consciousness you can apprehend the most general ideas; at this lowest level, very specific—well actually very specific motor movements.

So if you’re typing a word and you make a mistake, you don’t fix it conceptually; you move your finger and fix it, and so that’s kind of where it grounds out, and so our consciousness sort of grounds out at the bodily level, at the level of adjustable voluntarily adjustable micromusculature.

And then at the high level, at the highest level of abstract concepts, so it can move this consciousness.

Well, the world tree is a vision of the microcosm to the macrocosm. The tree is used as a metaphor for that, and so a proto-scientific idea, intuition of the idea that there’s a kind of dimension that constitutes zooming in on things, right?

To the smallest possible level of apprehension, and zooming out to the most general level of apprehension, dust particles to cosmos, let’s say.

Well psychedelics seem to expand that capacity so that consciousness can move up and down layers of apprehension that aren’t available to consciousness under its normal conditions.

And there, there are good accounts of shamanic experiences—they're very strange; they're very well documented. The shamanic experience involves a death, and then past the death, the capacity to move up and down this microcosmic to macrocosmic realm in a way that doesn’t seem possible under conditions of normal consciousness.

And so we’re raveling around again.

Well, the question is how far down the levels of analysis can consciousness go under extreme conditions?

And so—and I said this was speculation, but I’ve seen these dual—they’re often dual entwined serpents. They’re very common.

In fact, I have one made by an Indian carver, Canadian native carver in Maya. It’s so cool; it’s called a sea soodle. I have it up in my third floor. It’s set on two totem poles. There’s a man in the middle; there’s a serpent on both sides of him.

And I asked him what this image meant to his people because he’s still part of an unbroken tradition. He said they had a myth that something alien landed on the earth. It was this seasonal object, and that when it was rolling down the mountain that it landed on, it took the form of all the things that it encountered.

And so, well, like I said, this is in the realm of wild speculation. But I know what Crick thought about the origin of DNA.

Well, he thought it was too complex to have evolved!

Oh, obviously.

What do you mean? You mean the idea of it coming from elsewhere?

No! I mean I know that’s an infinite regression!

Okay, that’s what was okay, so that was all that was behind that, you know, bit of speculation, which I normally would do. These coiling surfaces—I think that under some conditions, people can vision can expand to the point where they can see down into the micro level; they can apprehend the micro level consciously.

You think that our consciousness can extend down to the micro level?

To the level—I do! The micro, the micro, micro, micro level of DNA?

Okay, well, since we’re on this topic, I have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin—like, four doses is enough, basically, to knock you out of your body.

I wouldn’t recommend it casually!

I took seven grams three times, and I had this shamanic experience; it was unbelievable. And I don’t even know how—I have no idea how to make sense.

Well, I believe that I could quite understand. You have a most extraordinary experience. I’ve never taken such a drug, but I could imagine the most remarkable experience.

But you’ve just said that you think that your consciousness can see into your cells and see the structure of DNA?

That has got to be utter nonsense, I’m sorry! Well, like I said, I’m perfectly reasonable—willing to admit forthrightly that that is a highly speculative idea.

Well, it is speculative, but it’s also got to be false!

Why?

Right?

No, no, and fair enough! Look, in all probability, you’re right.

Right?

I mean, we’re both wise enough to use Occam’s razor, right?

And so—and I said that, and it’s funny that that particular statement got picked up because I think that was the most—what would you say—secular, intuit, speculative idea that I’d ever uttered to my students.

Yes, well, fair enough. I mean, I understand that, and it’s strange to be in a position to defend it. I’m telling you why I was—why I made that, but there was more to it than that, you know, because in this visionary experience, I could feel my consciousness go down these levels of analysis.

And I could see things that appeared to me in my field of imagination, and I looked at them, and I thought, that looks a lot like DNA—

But you’re an educated man who already knows about DNA!

Yes!

These people didn’t know what people do about it—that’s what’s so...

No, they didn’t!

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that you could have a visionary experience and think you see your DNA in your cells, that of course is highly plausible.

Well, because I already know about it!

Yes!

What is not plausible is that somebody who does not know about it—an ancient Chinese sculptor, whatever it was, yes?

Who—working long before Watson and [ __ ] discovered the structure of DNA—could possibly apprehend.

Possibly, that just isn’t fair enough, and I guess I would only say in defense of that idea is that it is the case that consciousness can travel up and down levels of analysis.

In a sense, it really is inconceivable that that’s not an expandable capacity under some circumstances, you know, because you’ve got to ask yourself...

Like I do yoga in the morning, a kundalini yoga exercise, and I’ve done it for about 20 years, and I learned a long while back that when yogis are practicing their asanas—these positions—that's not yoga.

They practice the asanas because they’re postures that stretch you and then once they get to master them, they basically do an exploration of their body for places of discomfort and use the asanas to heal.

And you might say, well what do you mean heal? And, well, my experience is that if I move my head, for example, down like this, I can—I’ll have a pain manifest itself in my back where I’m tight, and then I can pay attention to that and loosen the musculature, and then the pain will disappear.

And as I’ve been recovering from my last illness, I’ve been doing this quite a bit because my body is full of knots and pain of all sorts, and I can explore them and do something with them.

And I actually think we can also do that to each other to some degree; we do that, massage therapists are very good at that.

I think it’s part of an elaborated grooming knowledge. But what that means is that internally, at least, whatever my consciousness is can apprehend these places of trouble that are physiological, yes?

And that I can explore them, and the question is, well how deep? First of all, what is that exploration? That’s the past.

How far down can you go? That is perfectly plausible!

Yes, I wouldn’t object to that; also, I wouldn’t wish to pin you down on what was a sort of throwaway speculation on the DNA.

But it does seem to me that that's kind of representative of what I mean by being drunk on symbols!

Yes, it’s... well, you are rightly hostile to post-modernism, and I’m not hostile to the post-modernist claim that there’s that there’s a terrible problem that arises when you understand that there’s an indefinite number of interpretations of things.

Yes, they got that right!

But what I’m really hostile to is the answer.

Okay, then. That’s good.

Okay, look, I want to put you—I’ve got one of my books here.

Now, I’ve talked too much during this discussion so far. There’s something I really want to ask you about if you don’t mind.

Well, yes, before—before I just really, just pursue this!

Okay, okay!

I can I can read this out.

Okay.

We’re on audio.

Sure.

This is one one of my—it’s my only written attack on postmodernism.

And this is from Laka, who says: “By calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely s capital s signify of a little less signified equals little s, the statement with s equals minus one produces a square root of minus one.”

Lacan then goes on to conclude that the erectile organ, the penis, is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above of the juices that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier minus one.

Then another quote from a feminist thinker, well this is actually an interpreter of her—her expositor Catherine Hales, talking about why fluid mechanics is difficult to understand.

And she says, “The privilege of solid over fluid mechanics and indeed the inability of science to deal with the turbulent flow at all,” she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity, whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid; women have openings that lack that sort of leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids.

From this perspective, it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence.

The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conception of fluids and of women have been formulated so as necessary to leave unarticulated remainders.

So okay, okay, so I’m going to play devil’s symbolism.

Okay, so let’s take that apart two ways!

Okay, okay!

The first is let’s deal with Laka.

Okay!

Laka is a fraud, as far as I'm glad you say that!

Well, I have tried to read Lacan, and I cannot make heads or tails of him!

Good!

And it may be because I’m stupid!

It’s not—I don’t think so.

Now people have accused Jung of the same sort of mysticism that Lacan engages in, but I can understand Jung.

I don’t think he’s a mystic at all.

What Jung was doing is very complicated, and it maps very nicely onto evolutionary biology.

Of all the French intellectuals that I’ve read, I think Lacan is the most fraudulent.

Okay, okay! So we’ll just put him aside, and you know I haven’t read that much Lacan, partly because I can’t.

Now, I’ve read a lot of Foucault, and I’m rereading The Order of Things, and The Order of Things, I would say, if you’re writing a book about modeling as well as reading the neuropsychology of anxiety, The Order of Things is very much worth reading.

Okay!

And he doesn’t wander off into ideological…

I’ve only found that he made one mistake in the first half of the book because Foucault is a social constructionist to a large degree, but he does talk about its categories of the imagination—that’s not exactly the phrase he uses, but he does make reference at one point to the fact that our conceptual structures are grounded in an underlying imagination, which to me is a nod to biology.

And so but I like The Order of Things; I read it a long time ago; I’m just rereading it now.

So forget about Lacan!

Yeah, the feminist.

Now I’m going to argue from the perspective of a biologist here, I would say I’m going to give the devil her due in this case; we do have a proclivity to map sexual relationships onto the world, and the degree— for obvious reasons—because we have to perceive sexual relationships at a very deep level.

We do have a tendency to animate things or to perceive them as if they’re animated, and the degree to which those a priori perceptual proclivities might bias what would otherwise be objective thinking is open for valid discussion.

Now, that doesn’t mean that—look, my daughter last night was engaged in the debate at the Oxford Union, and I was there; you were there.

Yeah, well, you heard Carol.

Yeah, well, that was a mind-boggling performance as far as I was concerned; it was exactly the example of the sort of thing that you’re tossing out.

It was absolutely beyond comprehension. I was so happy to be there because I thought I had never heard all of that expressed and simultaneously invalidated so effectively.

But you know the side she argued for won by the vote!

I didn’t know who won!

Which side won?

The side that we should move beyond meat!

Yes, independent of the merits of the underlying argument except for Carol’s, the fact that that feminist scholar who attributed meat eating to white supremacist, patriarchal oppression!

Yeah!

That argument was so appalling.

Was that the final one?

Right, right at the end!

Oh, you missed it!

Yeah, oh that’s too bad!

It’s too bad you really needed to be left for that.

Yes, so tell me then!

Oh my God, it was just—well that was essentially it. That was her argument that meat-eating was a consequence of the imposition of a patriarchal, racist, oppressive, okay, white supremacist narrative on essentially a feminine background.

Yeah, it’s the same thing!

Okay, well, um now you’re saying I—I’m saying that you don’t know how much of that character is my thinking despite my opposition to postmodernism.

That’s right! Yes, absolutely!

Yeah, well—that's a—you know that’s—an absolutely reasonable question and given that doubt, which I can certainly understand why you would hold, it’s perfectly reasonable of you, and I think perspicacious to have pointed to my attempt to speculate about how these images of intertwined helixes happen to propagate themselves all over the world.

Because I have a pro—see I have a problem with that because I can’t understand why that’s the case.

So for example, there’s a really interesting Chinese image which is one of the ones that I referred to in that particular lecture that shows—I hope I can remember this exactly right—so it’s this intertwined underlying serpentine structure giving rise to a female and male form, yes?

And it’s portrayed that way in the cosmogonic myth that, yeah, these forms emerge out of this underlying helical structure, and, but there are stories like that everywhere.

And so you might say, well it’s a case of false pattern recognition, and that’s really a problem, right? That’s the problem of misperception.

Okay, now wait!

I have no problem with—that’s my big problem!

I am equating it with DNA.

Yes, that’s [ __ ]!

However, yes, however what might be interesting would be a commonality between myths all around the world, and then anthropologists have argued about whether this is because of cross-infection of ideas or whether there’s something Jungian about that, and I think that’s a genuinely interesting question.

Yes!

And most of the affective neuroscientists that I’ve met, the good ones are tilted pretty hard towards the biological primitive argument.

Yes, forms of perception!

Well, color is one of them!

Well I think that’s interesting. And of course, the coincidence of an image or a statue in this part of the world in that part of the world, you should think about how improbable it is that two people might have hit upon the same design!

I mean the idea of, right, as snakes spiraling around each other; it’s not that difficult to think of it!

It’s not—it wouldn’t be ridiculously improbable that two people, two tribes on opposite sides of the world would independently come upon that?

No, no!

And it might not point to anything particular except that it is the use of snakes!

I would say, though, you know the idea of that coiled snake, or the dual coil snake is also a powerful symbol of healing, and so yes, that’s partly why it’s used as a symbol for physicians.

Yes, exactly!

And so—and there is the idea that’s part and parcel of that, and this would be, let’s say, separate from the DNA idea, and then snakes shed their skin and they’re reborn, and so that’s part of the reason why they’re symbols of transformation, exactly!

And that notion of death and regeneration is obviously central to the idea of healing, and so that’s another explanation for the use of the snake.

Okay, so I’m interested in the improbability of coincidence in this case. Now, if you say people in Scandinavia and people in the Amazonian jungle had independently developed an alphabet which was the same alphabet now, that would be impressive!

I mean, that would!

Right, well… yes, well, but—but—but it’s also equally impressive that separated people did develop alphabets!

Yeah, but not the same.

No, I know they didn’t use—but—but there’s a level at which it’s the same, right?

Because they are alphabetic, and they are the use of written forms to represent sounds, well it—that’s a sensible thing to have.

I mean, it is such a good idea that wouldn’t be improbable that two tribes would have the same idea, that’s true!

But, well, but it gets complicated too!

Well, it gets complicated in the context of this argument because one of the debates that Foucault had that was famous was a debate with Chomsky, yes?

And Foucault, of course, is a radical social constructionist, except when he isn’t now and then, right?

And I’m not being smart about that; The Order of Things is quite a careful book, but Chomsky was laying out a more archetypal argument in some sense.

And Chomsky thinks that there is something like an underlying language grammar, and so the fact that an alphabetic structure might be discovered by two separate peoples would be partly a reflective underlying biological commonality.

And so it is very difficult to draw a border between these, and I would also say I agree with you completely that associative thinking of the kind that you just read to me can go far astray.

What that is is false pattern recognition, you know! So it’s—it’s the app perception, or perhaps the projection of a pattern onto a background, let’s say an underlying reality that actually isn’t characterized by that pattern.

But—but that’s actually part of the dilemma of thought, though, too, isn’t it? Because like, I think thought is usefully parceled out into a revelatory element and a dialogical element.

And so the revelatory element is while you’re sitting there, and thoughts enter the theater of your imagination, and so it’s in a sense phenomenologically like they sort of spring up from the void, and you can be struck by a thought which is really interesting, right?

It’s like, I agree, it’s your thought. Why are you struck by it? Where does it come from?

Yes, that’s it!

No kidding, right?

Where does it come from?

But then there’s another element, which is, well not all intuitions are valid.

The things that strike you—even though being struck is often a pretty good indication that there’s something there—but it’s not always an indication!

And there are certain forms of psychopathology—schizophrenia, in particular.

Schizophrenia is characterized by the misfiring of that intuition system.

So for example, partly what happens to people who have ideas of reference—they’ll be watching television and the latent inhibition will get stripped away from their perception of the voices.

And so now the voices become magnified in significance, and to account for the magnification of emotional significance, they start thinking the television has a special message for me.

It’s like the receipt of a religious revelation!

And it’s often accompanied by religious ideation.

So it’s not that uncommon, although it’s somewhat uncommon for people who are flooredly schizophrenic to identify with Christmas.

Very light religious revelation; it is very likely I wanted to come to because you characterized yourself as religious sometimes, and yet you don’t seem to believe in a supernatural creator—not the people that you do, or not all the time!

I know they do!

When I believe in God, and I say, well, I act as though God exists.

Yes, but which is a reference to this mortal idea!

Last night, you seemed to be—well, let you come to the idea of truth!

You seem to be saying that that which is beneficial to humanity reduces your anxiety, or makes you feel good or reduces stress is true!

No, no, no, it’s more than that, and good! I’m glad that we’re on to this part of this discussion.

When Darwin first published his biological treaties, The Origin of Species, the New England pragmatists got a hold of his manuscript—William James and C.S. Peirce—and William James founded experimental psychology and C.S. Peirce was probably the most profound philosopher the Americans ever produced.

And they had a club—the psychological club.

It was either that or the philosophical club, but I believe it was the psychological club.

And they believed that Darwin’s theorizing required a new epistemology; it was so revolutionary.

And pragmatism is like an engineering truth claim, and I don’t think you can be an evolutionary biologist without being a pragmatist; I don’t think it’s possible.

I don’t think it’s coherent conceptually.

And so Peirce, in particular, developed pragmatism, and pragmatism is like an engineering truth claim.

And I don’t think you can be an evolutionary biologist without being a pragmatist; I don’t think it’s possible.

I don’t think it’s coherent conceptually, and so Peirce was trying to solve the problem of, well, how can something be true when we’re fundamentally ignorant about everything in the final analysis?

And the answer was, well we have truths that are true enough.

And you might say, well what do you mean true enough?

And the answer would be they’re true enough to be used as tools to achieve a certain end in a certain space over a certain time period.

And so your truth is true enough if it gets you from point A to B when you’re using it; the tool is adequate for the job.

If it performs the task intended, and for Peirce and the pragmatists that was it.

There was no true superordinate to that.

Now it’s complicated because some pragmatic truths are functional across broader spans of time and space than others, so they’re more like ultimate truths.

But this was not a grounding of truth in a Newtonian idea or Cartesian idea or even in an idea of objective truth because they derived their concept of truth from their analysis of the evolutionary process, and they said—and so what I really want to know, what you think about this, it’s like say there’s truth in the human form.

I’ll speak metaphorically, but biologically that truth only suffices for like 90 years, right?

We’re good enough!

We’re good enough as a model!

It may be that our knowledge of truth is incomplete and we can never be sure of anything, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t truth out there!

Well, truth is a slippery concept because it can be used in very many ways, and I’m not trying to—I believe me, I’m not trying to bandy words about.

I do not believe that the Newtonian conception of truth and the evolutionary conception of truth are commensurate, and I think the evolutionary—because, well, it’s tough, right?

Because you might think, well, when you’re talking about truth, are you talking about the nature of ultimate reality or are you talking about the relationship of your models to that reality?

I don’t know that I care too much about that.

Because I—I mean, let me tell you something that is true, okay?

We are—we are cousins of chimpanzees!

Yes!

That is objectively true!

It’s—it’s another thing that’s true, is that the earth orbits the sun!

Yes!

Yes!

These are not—what one can argue about the epistemology of that, but I want to be a realist about this and say that there may be kinds of truth which are somehow filtered through our Darwinian past and which influence the way we see truth, and we may be deceived by all sorts of things.

We may be self-deceived, but there are objective truths.

It is the business of science to find them, and science has tools for stripping off subjective bias, for stripping off self-deception, yes?

And that’s why we do double-blind trials!

Absolutely!

That’s why we use random assignations as well!

Yeah, absolutely!

Okay, right?

And who can argue with the power of the scientific process?

And—but I would also say that the religious people that you’ve debated, they lose before they open their mouths because they don’t notice that you impose this realist metaphysics on the argument before it starts.

Now I’m not saying that you’re not justified in doing that.

I’m not saying that because that’s open to question, but I am saying they don’t notice that that’s what’s happened!

But there’s a problem here; it’s a real problem, and this is the postmodern conundrum I would say.

There are—it’s useful and true to say that there are objective facts, but the problem is there’s an infinite number of them.

True!

Okay, so now the question is, as a scientist, how do you decide which facts to attend to?

And the answer to that is you cannot do that using the scientific process.

No, that’s true!

Okay, so, okay, so then the question is, look, I’ve done a lot of statistical analysis of data sets in my time, you know, and when I was a naive undergraduate, and I’m not particularly mathematically gifted by the way, statistics was quite a slog for me until I started to understand it conceptually, and then I started to enjoy it.

But I kind of imagined that the data contained the information and the statistical process was an algorithm to reduce the data to the information, and it was kind of a mechanistic process.

I didn’t realize at all that a data set is—you know, imagine I’ve had data sets that had, you know, 5,000 participants and 200 rows of variables—it’s like there’s a lot of information in that data set, and so then the question is how the hell do you derive a valid conclusion from that plethora of information?

Because you could report all sorts of meaningless correlations, right? They would be spurious, but also practically useless, and there are just endless numbers of those in the data set. You know, how do you judiciously use a statistical process to extract out the information that is a what’s true?

Yes, but it’s not just true; you want it to be useful!

I agree! Yes, right, okay!

And so that’s where the pragmatism issue comes in, right, because then we might say—and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I know you care deeply about truth, and I know that you’re motivated by it.

And so then I would say that that’s a metaphysical relationship in some sense; it’s an a prior metaphysical relationship because you made a commitment to truth.

And I would also say that that’s an act of faith because you might ask yourself in science, is it truth or untruth that serves the world well?

That’s where we came back— that’s where we came in because there are all sorts of truths which do not serve the world!

There are all sorts of truths which are very unpleasant!

Yes!

You get an analogy might be as a doctor; you have a patient who has incurable cancer, and you have to decide whether to tell that patient the truth or not, right?

Well, you could debate this with your colleagues—you might, um, your colleagues might say, well he’s better off not telling him; he’s better off not knowing.

So the truth in this case is not beneficial.

What would you pick?

What would you?

Well, would you want to know?

That’s irrelevant!

No, no, I would—I would want to know, okay?

Well, but I agree that there are dangerous truths, let’s say, and there are truths that under some circumstances might be harmful and that could be used as weapons.

But I would still say I don’t believe that you can be a scientist and discover objective truth, say, in a useful manner without being committed to a metaphysical vision of the redeeming power of the truth.

Because I don’t even think you can make the micro decisions that you’re making while you’re reading a book and sifting through it, right?

Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff without—I don’t want to impose this view on this conversation, right?

I’m trying to explore it because it’s—I’m very—I’ve dealt with plenty of bad scientists in my time, you know?

Psychology is rife with what they call p-hacking, where you just run repeated correlations until you find one that…

Yeah, oh that’s bad science!

Yes, but it’s also bad—but it’s bad ethics!

It’s like, well, why not look? Why not do that if it advances your career?

Yes, I’m quite—I mean that’s bad, and that’s not, I think, what we’re talking about.

I thought you were saying that truth is that which is beneficial.

In my analogy, when you’re arguing with your colleagues whether to tell this patient the truth, you could very well argue, shall we tell him or shall we not?

It would be beneficial not to tell him, or beneficial to—but everybody should agree that it is true.

That this man has cancer; that is true!

Yes, yes.

Well, this is partly why this issue is so unbelievably complicated because what you just said is true, but it’s also the case that you have to apply an ethical framework onto that infinity of— in order to focus on and communicate those—see, you’ve picked topics that you communicate to people, and there are other topics you didn’t pick.

Yes!

And there’s a lot—most of the other topics you didn’t pick, and so the question to me is—and this is partly why I got interested in Jung, by the way, because he was very interested in the unconscious direction of attention.

The psychoanalysts were fascinated by that; that’s partly why they’re interested in Freudian slips, but you—okay, one thing we could ask, do you think that you picked your field of study, or did it pick you?

I’m not sure.

But I don’t think that’s not relevant!

It doesn’t—I mean it is!

It has to be relevant because it’s actually the question of relevance, and so there’s a whole branch of cognitive science now—I’d like to have you talk to this colleague of mine named John Vervake. John Vervake is unbelievably smart, and the problem he’s spent his whole career focusing on is how in the world do you decide what to attend to when there’s an almost infinite number of things to attend?

That’s a big question!

It’s a huge question. It’s a question that applies to science when you decide what to work on, as you say, there’s an infinite number of things you could attend to, and you choose some of them, and that’s a decision which people take, and that biases your view of the world and everything.

But nevertheless, there is objective truth!

It doesn’t affect the fact that subjective truth—the mere fact there’s a very large number of things you could attend to, and you have to choose one of them doesn’t affect the fact that that there are lots of truths out there!

And right, but it definitely, it—yes, but it definitely does affect the way that science is conceived!

This is also why the postmodern critics have been so effective in what they’ve done; it’s because they’re pushing the notion that a narrative necessarily drives the process of inquiry even in relationship to objective facts, and I think that’s true!

And that’s partly what we’re discussing now.

I also think—and I don’t know how to reconcile these things—like the fact that you’re making a case for the existence of the objective facts, it's like I’m not going to argue about that.

That doesn’t mean I understand it fully because I can’t quite understand the relationship between the objective fact and the necessity for utility, and partly I can’t understand that on biological grounds.

You know because are fundamentally when you look at things, I would say that the description of truth that you’re purveying in right now in this argument, I’m not trying to make it any more general than that—is not one that’s well nested inside the epistemology that you would derive from evolutionary biology.

Because you would—you would say in some sense that we’re tilted in a very fundamental manner to only apprehend those things that will aid survival and reproduction.

And so to hell with the objective facts!

Well, that’s probably true!

That our sense organs and our bias towards that which helps us survive—and our internal sense also to speak our attention mechanisms inside our thought mechanisms—so we are creatures who evolved on the African savannah and from forests early on, and our ability to understand the world, let alone what we attend to, is limited by that.

We are blinkered by the fact that that that our bodies and our brains were designed to survive in Africa.

Well, that’s what that feminist critic was pointing to in a very, well, awkward and tendentious manner.

And an overstated manner, absolutely not as bad as Lacan!

Right, well then, then we are living with—I don’t understand quantum theory, and the reason I don’t understand quantum theory from an evolutionary point of view is that it’s not evolving.

It doesn’t map onto our bodies.

Exactly!

And I don’t—so there are—I think what’s remarkable actually is that there are people who understand quantum theory.

I agree!

I mean that—and that’s—well that also points to—to your point that also points to our capacity to apprehend truths that in some sense appear to be outside the pure confines of the evolutionary struggle.

Yes!

But then that’s also a problem in some ways for evolutionary theory.

I mean you can wave that off as a spandrel, but I think that’s a big mistake when we’re talking about something as profound as the capacity to understand.

So why should you be so presumptuous as to think you can understand all these things when you’re only an animal which has evolved to survive and reproduce?

Right?

But the thing that’s so horrible about that in some sense is that’s also at the core of the postmodern critique of science that claim.

Now the human humanities types, when they make a claim like that, often sound like the woman that you just described, but you know I try to give the devil his due and I’m trying to do that with postmodernism because, you know, I think the conclusions that were drawn from the postmodernist canon—the fundamental conclusion as far as I’m concerned of the French postmodernist process allied with a certain kind of Marxism is that the entire process of categorization, all our categories, plus the process of categorization are attributable to the expression of will to power—that’s it!

Oppression, tyranny, dominance!

And there’s actually, I would say that the evolutionary biologists are in part responsible for that weirdly enough.

I’m not trying to throw stones, you know!

I’d like to think of myself, to the degree that I can manage it, as an evolutionary psychologist.

I accept the tenets of evolutionary biology; I don’t think you can understand anything about biology without doing that.

But here’s the argument from the biological perspective: We ratchet ourselves up hierarchies of power to attain positions of status, particularly as males, to give us preferential access to mating resources, and that contaminates everything we do.

It’s like, hey, now I want to ask you one final question; I know we’re running out of time, but I don’t care.

I want to ask you this question.

Okay, I talked to Sam Harris; I’ve talked to Sam Harris five times.

And the first time I talked to him, I was extremely ill, and we got bogged down in a discussion of truth, pragmatism versus objective—something we’ve been banning that back and forth and it’s a tough nut to crack.

And then we had four more discussions that were all public and there was a tremendous amount of interest in them, which was quite stunning.

It was staggering!

We had 10,000 people at in Dublin to one, and about the same to the O in London, and we were discussing issues just like this, you know.

And I made some mistakes dealing with Sam because I had a point I wanted to make, you know, and it was I suppose the point of this pragmatism in some sense in its relationship to evolutionary biology.

And so I was trying to sort of win the argument, and I have found as a consequence, let’s say, of a baptism by fire that that’s not a good way to approach.

Like one of the things I really wanted to do with you—I hope we managed this today—was to ask you questions and find out more about what you thought like in a real genuine manner!

And none of that—the last time I talked to Sam, all I did was ask him questions, and we had by far the best discussion we’ve ever had!

Okay!

And so he, through that discussion, I was alerted to reasons why he was so antipathetic to the idea of religion.

Okay!

And so I thought, I would—so Sam is very obsessed with the idea of totalitarian atrocity, I would say, evil fundamentally if you wanted to make it metaphysical, but you could say restrictive dogmatic tribalism of the sort that makes us demonize and destroy people, ideas, o’clock, but...

So what did you want to ask me because we have our night of time?

I want to ask you when you talk about religion, yes, do you identify the religious impulse, let’s say, or even the religious phenomena with the totalitarian proclivity for dogmatic certainty and the potential acceleration of aggression and atrocity as a consequence?

No, I have—I care first and foremost about scientific truth, and so to me it is a scientific question whether there is a supernatural power—creative power, intelligence in the universe.

I think that’s a very fascinating question.

I think that if that were true, it would be the most important scientific truth.

If there is, that would be, it would be a fundamentally different kind of universe that we live in if there is a creative intelligence.

So although I have a secondary interest in negative consequences of religion and so on, especially in Islam, my fundamental interest is in the scientific truth, which I believe is a scientific question, even if it can’t be answered by scientific means.

It—that there either is a God or there isn’t, and that that either is a creator or not at the base of the universe, an intelligence, I think there’s not.

I think that intelligence is something that comes late into the universe as a consequence of a long evolutionary process; it happened here, it no doubt happened what probably happened in other parts of the universe.

And do you distinguish between intelligence and consciousness?

For this purpose, no!

Okay? For this purpose, no!

Okay!

So let me ask you this question.

And do you think that sexual selection is mediated by consciousness/slash intelligence?

In those species that have consciousness, yes!

I mean then I would ask you to what degree do you think that consciousness operates as a fundamental mechanism of selection and shaping?

Because that's—a very profoundly interesting question, and I mean sexual selection happens in insects which I do not think are conscious!

So—yeah, well that’s a tough one!

I mean I know butterflies can detect a deviation from symmetry, and they’re part of the part of one in a million, so yes, there’s sexual selection throughout the animal kingdom.

And consciousness can happen without consciousness; I think so, yes!

But let’s—let’s look in humans!

Yes! Yes!

I think so, okay?

So, okay, so when I look at the religious epistemology cross-culturally, I see a bipartite structure at the bottom of the hypothesizing; there’s an idea that there’s a material substrate that consists of a kind of latent potential—that might be one way of looking at it—and that there’s the action of a forming process on top of that.

And it looks to me like it’s something like—what would you call it?—an intuitive apprehension of the relationship between consciousness and the rise to complexity of living forms.

And the reason that I’m curious about that from an evolutionary perspective is that I can’t see how sex—forget about unconscious sexual selection for a minute—oops!

We’ll just parse that off because maybe they’re gradations of consciousness; I don’t know.

Insects do some damn complex things.

Have you ever seen that BBC clip of the pufferfish making a sculpture?

Oh yes, I think so!

Yes, yes.

I mean, yes—that’s quite something, because that pufferfish is—it’s really an act of creativity; it's a—you might say