Music and the Patterns of Mind and World

[Music] Hello, I'm Andrew Moody, and this is Big Ideas.

This is a stereogram; you've probably seen these before. It's a computer-generated picture that presents a three-dimensional image if you're able to focus your eyes just at the right point. It takes a while to get the hang of it; you have to sort of relax and try to focus just behind the picture, and then slowly a three-dimensional image begins to form. But it doesn't always work, and sometimes you're left wondering if the 3D image is really there at all.

According to Jordan Peterson, a psychologist who teaches at the University of Toronto, stereograms are analogous to the way that we experience reality. Music is another; it is also composed of patterns. Because music cannot be reduced to words, it conveys a world of meaning beyond reason. Peterson is a psychologist with a philosophical bent. He is interested in how we perceive things and what we get from it, and he takes us on a tour through music, computers, painting, and chess. Get ready for a heady and complex ride.

I think that music is a genuine mystery. Music is one of the experiential phenomena that we all have access to. It's like looking into the night sky or at the Grand Canyon. There's something about it that seems to speak about things that are beyond the mundane. It's an interesting thing that music can do that because, although it has this arguably transcendental element, it's also something that's very accessible to people in general. It's very rare to find someone who doesn't like music, so it's transcendental and universal at the same time.

It also seems to me that music reliably speaks to people of meaning and that the reason that music plays such a popular or powerful role in our culture is because the meaning that music speaks of is beyond rational critique. We’re very rational, and we're very intelligent, and so we've been able to make intellectual hash out of most of the things that had traditionally offered people a grounded sense of meaning. But because music is beyond rational criticism, it seems to have been able to retain its experiential connection with transcendent meaning, despite the fact that our rational mind has destroyed almost everything else that's transcendental.

Part of the reason I think music can do this is precisely because it is beyond either verbal formulation or verbal criticism. If you listen to a song, whether it has lyrics or not — you could perhaps assume that it doesn't — it does something to you. If someone who had never heard music asked you what it did, you couldn't tell them in any way that was a reasonable summary of the experience itself. I suppose you could consider that analogous to trying to describe color to someone who's blind. Whatever music is about isn't translatable into language.

Now, we can use language to augment our pleasure in music; we do that with lyrics constantly. But whatever it is that music speaks of, if it speaks of something, is not something you can speak of in words. Now, as rational people, we're also inclined to presume that if it's real, you can speak about it in words. But there have been cultures since the dawn of history that believed that there were certain things that were not only unspeakable from a verbal perspective but whose meaning was actually demolished if it was put in words.

For example, in ancient Hebrew societies and in current Islamic societies, it's heretical, improper, to make an image of the transcendent. The reason for that is not merely an arbitrary moral law nonsensical from a rational perspective; the reason for that is that some things lose their meaning as soon as they're translated into something as tiny as a word. Music is one of those things.

I made this little painting here; it's about 7 feet across. Actually, when I was a graduate student about 20 years ago, I was trying to figure out what meaning meant. I designed the painting — I'll show you a bigger picture of it later — to be something that would kind of move when you looked at it. If you make a geometrical figure that's sufficiently complex, then when your brain looks at it, it tries on different fits, and it looks to your visual perception system as if it's moving.

A Necker cube, a reversing cube, is a simple example of that. I wanted to make something here that moved and danced visually, like a piece of music moves and dances — that seems to intimate something beyond itself. It's hard to do that with a static sculpture; it's hard to do that with visual arts in general. We do seem to approach it to some degree with dance, and dance is another art form that speaks of things that are beyond words.

That doesn't mean that dance is about nothing; it just means that it's about something that can't be easily put into words. Now, I actually think you can understand what music means, but there's a real problem in doing it. The problem in understanding what music means is that it's only simple if you change the way you look at almost everything.

The funny thing is, is that music speaks to you of meaning whether you understand it or not, and that's one of the reasons it's an imperishable art. Now, I think what music speaks to you of is real. In fact, I think it's more real than anything else. But I would also say that's not normally how people think.

Okay, so that's the first part of this spiel. I want to tell you some interesting things about perception. Now, there's this problem that's come up in the last quarter of the 20th century that was formally described by Daniel Dennett, among others. It's been something that's been plaguing people who have been attempting to design machines that can actually operate in the real world.

Early artificial intelligence researchers were pretty optimistic about building things like general-purpose robots because they believed fundamentally that the world laid itself out in easily accessible objects and that those objects had some reality beyond their perceptual appearance. The problem with developing a machine that could operate in the real world was only determining how it should act, but it turns out that wasn't right. It turns out it's very, very hard to make a machine that can perceive.

In fact, it's so hard that it seems technically impossible. That's strange because we can perceive, but the problem we solve while we perceive is so complex that in some ways it appears uncomputable, which is one of the reasons we don't have general-purpose robots. It's also why we don't have computers that can accurately translate speech. You know, you're supposed to be able to talk to your computer; people have been promising that for 30 years, but you can't talk to your computer because a computer can't understand what you're saying.

The reason for that is, it turns out it's very difficult to listen to what someone's saying, and that's partly because all of the information is not encoded in the sounds that they're making. For example, part of the reason you can understand what I'm saying is that you know more or less that this is a lecture about psychology. You know it has a scientific basis; you know that there are certain things I'm not going to talk about. The entire context within which you sit informs your understanding of my speech, and every word I say helps build a framework for you that informs your ability to understand each word.

A computer just can't do that. Well, Dennett called this the frame problem, and the frame problem was put in a very simple way by Medin and Niglar in the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Medin and Niglar pointed out that you can categorize a relatively small finite number of objects in virtually an infinite number of ways. You might think, well, what does that have to do with looking at the world?

The answer to that is: well, perception is a form of categorization. When you look at something, you know what that thing is. Your visual system is doing a kind of classification, but it turns out that there's a very large number of ways to look at things. So, for example, right now I'm looking at you as if you're an audience full of people. But if I were an impressionist painter, I could be looking at you as if you were surfaces from which certain colored lights were reflecting.

You might think that I suppose in some way is obvious, but it's useful to remember that when the Impressionists had their first shows in Paris, basing their artistic production on this transformation of perception, they caused riots. All right, so perception is a very difficult process, and artists actually teach us how to see. I don't mean that in some impractical way; I mean that the way we use our eyes has been informed for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps, by the experts among us who were able to use their visual systems better than anyone else and who could communicate that.

It's hard to see the world well. You can think of that if you're playing chess. You know, we had to build big computers to beat grandmasters at chess, and they can barely do it. That's all they can do. Right? Big Blue plays chess, but it can't walk down the street, and it's not good at riding a bicycle. It's a one-purpose machine. The way it plays chess isn't the way that people play chess. It plays chess by doing a reasonably exhaustive search of every single combination.

On a chessboard, there's an unbelievably large number of potential combinations of moves. It's immense. A chess game is a rather bounded world, you know, all things considered. There's a finite number of men; they have finite rules. But nonetheless, it's an unbelievably complex environment in terms of its space of possibilities. Expert chess players appear to identify configurations of men that have some relevance. So what they're able to do is to look at the board and rapidly determine what they should pay attention to and what they shouldn't pay attention to.

They develop that skill by practicing over thousands of games and studying chess games, and so forth, and so on. We don't duplicate that with a computer. What you could say is that an expert chess player is an expert at being able to see a chessboard, and they see extremely well. Then once they've seen, they can kind of put constraints around the cognitive complexity of the problem and operate within that.

Well, you guys are doing that all the time when you look at the world. But there's so much of your brain devoted to it, and you're so bloody good at it that you don't even know what's happening. When you look at the world, it's like there it is, and that's all objective and obvious, and there's the objects. You know they have nothing to do with your perception, but it is absolutely not that clear.

It's not clear for a lot of reasons. I mean, one is the frame problem. The other is that it turns out that when you look at the world, you don't see objects, and then think about them, and then figure out how to act. Your eyes map onto all sorts of parts of your body. For example, your retinas map right onto your spinal cord, and that means your eyes can make your body move without you thinking and without you seeing.

That's a pretty weird thing. It's hard to understand until you understand that what your retina is doing is picking up patterns. It's like a matrix, right? It's like a TV screen; it picks up patterns from the outside world and then translates them into the patterns of motor output. There's no intermediation of perception whatsoever if you're moving very quickly, and there can't be because it takes you too long to see anything to be fast.

That's why, by the way, when you drive down the road in your car, you don't look right in front of the hood. What good is that? If you see it in front of the hood, you've already run over it. You have to look like half a second down the road because anything that happens to you closer than that is already too late. So you look far enough down the road so that you can get your body to do what you want it to do and take into account how long it takes you to see the world, which may be up to half a second.

I mean, that's one estimate; I think that's too long, but that's the standard estimate at the time. Half a second's a long time. You go 40 feet in the car going 60 miles an hour in half a second. The point I'm making there is that when you see the object, the seeing produces the action.

For example, you have a little mechanism in your motor system that allows you to grab things, and you practiced the hell out of that when you were 2 years old. Right? You're just grabbing things left, right, and center until you got the grip motion down to an automated state. Well, if you look at a cup, the act of looking at the cup reduces the threshold for activation of the grip mechanism, and that isn't because you see the cup and then you think, "I'll pick it up." It happens as a consequence of seeing it.

It turns out that when you're looking at the world, you don't see objects; exactly what you see are things that it's useful to interact with, and those things are more like tools. So I would say, well, you're looking in this room, and what you see are things to interact with, and you think those are objective objects, but they're really not. Or maybe they are, but they're a very, very, very tiny subset of all the objects you could see in this room.

Someone like a schizophrenic, whose perceptions have been somewhat fragmented, has a hard time focusing on the universal class of usable objects that everybody looks at. So a schizophrenic, and sometimes an artist too, can get lost in contemplation of the complex patterns in the carpet or the shades of colors that are in the person's shirt next to you, or all these complex things that you can see around you but that you pay no attention to whatsoever.

How do you ignore all that? You ignore almost everything—99.9% and far more percent of everything that's around you. You don't see; you see relevant things, and we really don't know how you do it. Now, you know already how complex a chess game is and how uncomputable that is, yet you're interacting with an environment whose complexity leaves a chess game in the dust. Your environment is composed of an infinite number of hierarchically stacked chess games, and yet you wander through it without a second's thought unless something goes wrong.

It turns out that perception is the hard part. Now, artists have always known this. And you get modern artists like Believe that McGr on the right. McCreed is telling you that the average person is blinded by their presuppositions; that's what that painting means. The visual illusion on the left, which was constructed by a perceptual scientist, shows how with knowledge of the visual system, you can play games with it.

The game there is: well, what is that exactly? Is it an amalgam of lines, or is it a square in the middle of a diamond? Well, I would say it's both of those, and then what it is to you depends on what it is that you would do with it. Well, you don't do anything with that except look at it, but your visual system doesn't know that.

It's a nude descending a staircase. Well, why is that a nude descending a staircase? Well, you may be able to see it and you may not be able to see it, but what it is is the geometric figure of a human being with the fourth dimension averaged across the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is time. What you see is the nude transformed into a geometric figure at each point of the descent down the staircase.

Now, you might say, well, that's not a realist painting, and I would say, well, don't be so sure about that. Abstraction sometimes is more real than reality. Or do you think that numbers are less real than things? Well, I tell you, you can do a lot of things with numbers you can't do with things, and you could argue that the numbers are more real than the things.

I could say, well, that's more real than what you see because you can't see time across sequences; you only see it in slices, and that's across sequences. And then there's Picasso on the left. Part of what Picasso was doing, apart from playing with time and angle, was trying to determine just how badly you could mangle and decompose an iconic image and still be able to recognize it as an image.

It turns out, well, there's not a single thing in that painting that's reminiscent of a face; it's the Gestalt that does it. You have a specialized system in your brain that's attached to your emotional systems in an area called the amygdala that partly deals with fear. That is a specialized face detector system, and it's so specialized that if you turn faces upside down, it loses about 60 or 70% of its ability to discriminate.

It's really specialized. You look at people, and their faces pop out, and you think, man, there's so much difference between faces. There's not that much difference at all, objectively speaking. It's certainly possible for you to have a stroke that will leave you almost entirely intellectually and perceptually intact and yet be absolutely unable to tell one face from another.

Well, on the bottom left, I guess that's a little girl. Well, how is it that you can know that? Well, it's partly because Picasso has taught you to see things like that, but also because your visual system is unbelievably good at producing rapid abstractions. Think about it this way: you know those simple drawings that kids make of stick figures? Those aren't simple, right?

Because a stick figure doesn't look anything like a person. In fact, it looks about as unlike a person as anything possibly could and still be a person. The thing that's so interesting about a kid's stick figure is it gives you insight into the tremendous ability of them to abstract away from reality, right? And they're really not images at all; they're like hieroglyphs. They're quasi-linguistic representations because you know a figure is the next best thing to a written symbol. Kids, they just generate those non-stop.

A house — this is a house; it's got some smoke coming out of it. Right? You recognize that in no time flat. A kid three years old, four years old, can spin one of those off in no time flat. Their perceptual systems are unbelievably sophisticated, and they do not merely map self-evident objects onto the cognitive system. Perception doesn't work like that at all, and it's difficult to overemphasize that.

I knew two people on a beach — grief. Now that's a really interesting one. You can just nail that as grief in no time flat. Why? Well, the color — it's death green and purple. The — I don't know what he did with the eyes, why it manages it so well. This appears like a tear, I think, and this, of course, is a handkerchief. It's a striking image, and it's so mangled that it's almost beyond recognition.

Nonetheless, you can categorize it from an emotional perspective in no time flat. What's that? It's a dalmatian. There's the head. Do you see it? There's the leg; there's the leg; there's the back of it. So everybody see the dalmatian? How many people see it? It's there, right? How many people don't see it? Well, is it there or not? Collar, head, shadow, leaves, background, sidewalk. Once you get it, you can't not see it. If you don't get it, if you don't grip it as a Gestalt, what is it? Random patterns?

Well, they're not random, but that's only because you've had — you're familiar with dogs and living things. That's as much of a random pattern as anything you could generate, except that it also happens to be a dog. How do we see things? That's a really good question. It's really hard to answer. Partly, we limit our vision. We see through a lens, and it's hard to describe what this lens is.

It's the lens that allows us to use our intuitions about a situation to specify the meaning of the current moment. So imagine you're reading a book, and then you think, well, how do you read that book exactly? Do you read it letter by letter? Well, little kids do, but they don't like to read, and that's because they have to read letter by letter. You read a book letter by letter and see how much enjoyment you get of it.

Right? So you get the letters automated; you build a little machine in the back of your mind that nails those letters and then common combinations, and then you can read word by word. Then you automate that with several thousand hours of practice until you're so good at that that when you look at a word, you can't help but read it. Just goes off in your head like the word is in the outside world.

Then if you keep practicing, you see phrases, and if you're really good, you start to see sentences, but you get pretty speedy at that point. Okay, then the question is, when you're reading a book, do you read it phrase by phrase or sentence by sentence? The answer to that is, well, no, not exactly. You read it — you read the word, you read the phrase, you read the sentence, you read the paragraph, you read the chapter, you read the book; you know the cover, you know the culture, you know the intent of the author, and all of those things are going on simultaneously while you're trying to extract meaning out of that book.

So it's as if you're looking at the word through a lens made up of these successive layers of knowledge that you have that allow you to zero in on the meaning of what it is that the author is attempting to explain. And then you think, well, what does — so think about how someone translates. You can't do it word by word; you can't do it phrase by phrase and letter by letter. Well, just forget it, and you can't get a computer to translate. Why? Well, it’s because when you read something, you figure out what it means, and then you translate it so that it also means that in the next language.

So it's as if the verbal portrayal is one mode of reality perception, but it translates onto another mode, and that mode is meaning. Then it can be back translated into another language, and that's how a good translator does it, and that's also why translation is an art. Right?

I mean, did you get the meaning right? Well, who knows? If it's a philosopher, I mean, philosophers mean a lot of different things at the same time. The question is, what's the level of reality at which do you translate the words? Well, it seems to have something to do with movement and action and behavioral output. It seems to have something to do with the fact that we have a body; it isn't a merely intellectual exercise. Because when you read something and it has meaning, you think, I know what that means.

What that means is that having read this, I know how to do something differently or I know how to conceptualize something differently so that my actions will be different in the future. That's why we generally say if it's fiction, say that it has a moral — right? There's a behavioral consequence. That's what the meaning of the story is; that's the point. You know, if you get the point, that means that, well, you either do something differently or you perceive and then act generally differently. If it's really meaningful, you say, well, that changed my life.

What does that mean? I no longer see things the same way. That's as close to literal truth as you need. You know, I no longer think the same things are important; well, it's important things to which you devote your action. If the thing is powerfully meaningful, then it transforms the manner in which you act and the aims towards which you act. That's meaningful.

Now, our lenses help us specify meaning. Well, you know, your lenses give you all sorts of different takes on the world, and you might think, well, are those takes real? And I would say, well, here's the odd thing: they are real, but any visual landscape is so complex that you can derive a very large number of real representations.

I could say, well, is a low-resolution photograph real? Is it more or less real than a high-resolution photograph? What if it's black and white? Is that less or more real than color? What if it's three-dimensional instead of two-dimensional? What if it's abstracted? Etc. etc. You can imagine how many photographs of a single object you could conceivably take. They're all slices of what that thing is, or they're representational slices of our conceptions of what it is, and they're all valid.

There's a large number of valid interpretations. You know, it's a funny thing because the humanities ran into the frame problem. The humanities ran into the frame problem with postmodernism because the postmodernists started to become aware of the fact that if you took a book, there was no end to the number of interpretations you could derive from it.

And so the postmodern thought, well then, anything goes. No texts have any intrinsic meaning. Well, I don't think that's true for a variety of reasons, but it was certainly an appropriate inference given what they had discovered. If you can't specify the meaning of a text, how can you be sure that it has any meaning at all? Very hard question.

It turns out that at least in part, meaning is dependent on the lens. So imagine this — imagine that this is what the world's like: it's an infinite hierarchical landscape, not of objects but of patterns, and some of those patterns are objects. Patterns that persist, for example, are patterns that persist that are useful.

So if I say to you, well, what's a chair? And you say, well, a chair has four legs, a seat, and a back. And I say, well, no, a stump doesn't have any of those, and neither does a beanbag, but they're both chairs. And so then you say, well, it's a chair if you can sit on it. And I say, well, you can sit on a table. It turns out that defining what a chair is no easy thing even though you know one when you see one.

Well, imagine this: the world is made out of patterns, and those patterns can be interpreted in a very large number of ways. But it's more complicated than that because your mind is made up of patterns too, and when you take your mind and the patterns that are in your mind and you apply them to the world, then what you get is an interaction between the patterns that the world is made out of and the patterns that your mind is made out of, and that's an even more complex pattern.

It has something to do with the reality as such, but it also has something to do with you. Then I would say, well, the reality is actually in the interaction between the two sets of patterns. I don't mean that metaphysically; I mean the reality is in the interactions between the two sets of patterns.

When I said if you want to understand what music means, you have to change the way that you think about things, what I mean is that what music speaks of is a way of understanding reality that is not like the way we understand reality, and yet it's a way that, even when merely intimated, which is what music does, it grips people powerfully and in a way that cannot be rationally criticized unless you say that the meaning that music speaks of is not real. Well then, I would say it depends on your definition of reality, and you know there's lots of ways to play that game.

You know, you can define thing A or thing B as real or out of reality in a variety of different ways. Well, you have to make choices about what you decide is real, right? That's why philosophers since time immemorial have pointed out that, like it or not, your existence is grounded in faith. Now, what's your lens like?

I can tell you what my lens is like. Imagine I'm writing a paper, which I do fairly often. Um, why do I write the paper? Well, let's make it simpler; why do I write the sentence? Well, I write the sentence to contribute to the paragraph, and I write the paragraph to contribute to the essay, and I write the essay to contribute to the paper, and I write the paper because it's part of being a scientist.

I am a scientist because it's part of being a professor, and I'm a professor because it's part of, at least in principle, being a good citizen. Being a good citizen has a definition in a Judeo-Christian capitalist society. Being a good citizen is being a Judeo-Christian capitalist, for better or for worse.

And so when I'm even when I'm engaged in something as potentially trivial as writing a single sentence in an essay, all of those sources of knowledge bear on it simultaneously, and that's what helps me specify its meaning. You can't say that any one of those levels of analysis is more real than any other.

Now, you can say it's more pragmatically worthwhile to focus on a certain level at a certain point in time, but I'll tell you, if I get a paper that's rejected badly enough — which happens fairly often — I don't start thinking, well, the sentence was wrong. I start thinking I'm a pretty awful scientist, and therefore I must not be a very good professor, and that puts the whole productive citizen thing in doubt.

And you think hard about that for a bit, and you'll understand real quick why people don't like other people who mess around with their presuppositions, right? Because it goes pretty quickly up the old reality hierarchy from, you have a stupid idea, to you're — your moral grip on your privileged position is unjustifiable.

Well, let's take a simple lens. Okay, how do you look at the world? Well, you're a motivated creature, and you're alive, and you're always doing something, fiddling around with something, you know. In the old Mesopotamian creation myths, the goddess who lived underneath everything, she'd always come up in a terribly destructive roar because people were running around on the planet doing things and disturbing her.

Well, we still believe that, right? Because we believe if we mess around with the environment long enough, some all hell is going to break loose. But you know, we're always running around messing things up; that's what we do, right?

We're going from point A to point B, and you know how it is — you have a goal, you pursue it, you get the goal. Soon as you get the goal, you have another goal, and you pursue that. Soon as you get that, it's Sisyphus; roll the rock up the hill, roll it down the hill, roll it up the hill, roll it down the hill. Eventually, you get tired of that, and you die.

You're stuck in one of these, and it gives your life value because it turns out that the way your emotional systems work is that they only work if you have a goal. So you have a goal, whatever that is, and then anything that happens to you that puts you closer to the goal that makes you happy, and it turns on your systems that make you go ahead.

Move forward; be attracted to anything that gets in the way of your goal, depending on its potency, produces negative emotion, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, shame, guilt, anger. It stops you or makes you move backwards. You're a pretty simple creature in some ways; you're going somewhere. If things are going well, you're happy because happy means things are going well in progression to a goal.

If they aren't, you're not happy; forward, stop, reverse. Forward is happy; stopped is anxious; reverse is frustration, disappointment, pain. We're linear creatures, and we're always on the move, and we look at the world through a motivated lens, right?

This isn't secondary; it's not after perception; it informs perception itself, which means really that you can't look at the world without wanting something. Which also means that the way the world looks to you depends on what you want. Now, that's a scary thought. What do you see when you're looking at the world?

Well, you see — they're not objects; they've been called affordances. You see things that have relevance to you. Well, a thing has to persist a bit for it to be relevant to you, so a lot of the things that we see are objects, but not everything. Here's one; it's an ad hoc category: firemen can see this, but other people can't. Things to take out of your apartment while it's burning down.

Okay, now that's a category, right? You can even imagine that as a perceptual category, but the things that it contains share virtually no objective features. Pets, spouses, probably things of sentimental value, money. Well, then maybe the list gets more difficult to define. But you understand, you see that the goal there, which is to get out of the apartment before you die, with some things of value defines what you see.

And you may object, well, I wouldn't actually see that. And I would say, oh yeah, you would. If you're looking at a bowl of fruit, and it has three bananas and two apples and an orange in it, and I ask you what that is, and you say it's a bowl of fruit, what you see is fruit, not two apples and a whatever I mentioned — two bananas, two apples, and a peach. You see fruit; you see what you categorize or objects; you categorize when you see.

So you're moving along from where you are to where you want to go, and you parse the world up into useful things that get you to where you want to go and annoying things that don't. If everything works out fine, well, you get here, and then you have a new one of these. But there's a catch.

Now, here's the catch: when you look at the world, you hardly see anything that's there. You know you're simplifying things, but everything that you don't see is still there. So imagine that you're inhabiting this little sort of simplified and somewhat perfected domain all the time; it's wandering around you. It's part of what you inhabit, but the real world — whatever that is — is out there.

Now, I've often thought about the story of Genesis, you know, the story of Adam and Eve, in that regard. Because what you have there is a kind of paradise where everything's really going well, and you know you've all lived in a paradise like that when things were going really well, right? But there's always snakes in those paradises, and the reason for that is just because things are going well doesn't mean you've accounted for everything, and you can't account for everything.

So there's always something lurking around from underneath, and if you go and mess with that thing, then all hell breaks loose. You think, well, has that ever happened to you? Well sure, it happens to you if you have a relationship and the person you're having a relationship with cheats on you. That's a snake for sure. It happens to you if you're well, and then you're not. It happens to you if you're dependent on a family member, and they die, right?

It's the unrevealed complexity of the world that manifests itself suddenly that wreaks havoc on our little paradises. Well, and we're so damn curious, hey? We just can't leave well enough alone. That's human beings for sure, right? Just like the Catholics say, heritable sin, right? You put people in a paradise and you tell them not to do one thing, and you can bloody well be sure that's the first thing they're going to do because we're so curious we cannot leave things alone.

We're always unraveling, sweating, looking at things we're not supposed to look at, and so on and so forth. And you know it's a great thing, and we learn a lot, but we pay a big price for it. The question is, what do you look at when you don't know what you see? What is it that you see when you don't know what you see?

So think about it this way: this is a very, very hard thing to understand. Remember when the towers fell? What did you see? Well, you say, well, I saw the towers fall. I said, no, no, no; if all you saw was that the towers fell, you wouldn't have looked at it 50 times.

Why did you have to look at it 50 times? Well, because you couldn't believe it. What did that mean? It meant that the event was so complex that you couldn't perceive it. What fell? The monetary system in the US; the Western economy; it was the transformation of the Cold War. It was a new paradigm. It was a battle between good and evil that popped up pretty quick, like the next day, pretty much.

You had to look at it over and over and over and over because you didn't know what you were seeing. You didn't know how to see what you were seeing. And you think, okay, I don't quite get that.

Then I would think, okay, when you're driving your car and it breaks down, what is it? When it breaks down, you might say, it's a car. And I would say, if you persist on thinking that that thing that isn't moving is a car, you're going to have nothing but frustration because what it is now is a very complex assemblage of parts you don't understand, one of which is key to transforming it back into a car.

What happens is that it reveals itself suddenly as a consequence of its non-compliance with your wishes as the complex structured entity that it actually is. You have to go pay a mechanic because the mechanic knows the magic sequence that will turn this intransigent bit of complex junk back into the simple thing that you can drive to work. Well, you'll pay for that, right? Because it's valuable.

For you to get that thing back to being a car takes you maybe 10 years because what do you know? You're more likely to make it worse. The mechanic will just go "tap," and you'll say, well, you've charged me $500 for that! And he'll say, well, it's a savings for you, right? You don't know where to tap, it's a long trip. What do you see when you don't know what to see?

That's what I think music is about now. I'll tell you why. So what music does, think of Bach. Now, what he does is he takes this temporal span, and then he builds these complex patterns across it. Right? And some of the patterns go like this, and some of them go like this, and there's a pattern here, and a pattern here, and a pattern here, and a pattern there, and some of them are going backwards.

I mean, the guy is complicated, you know? It's stunning actually; he actually wrote a song that you can play upside down and backwards, and it's the same song, man. It's unbelievable! Bach wrote so much music that it would take a talented copyist, someone who just copies music, 40 years of 8-hour days just to transcribe it.

Anyways, Bach presents you with this landscape; it's an abstracted landscape, but what the landscape says is look at all the cool patterns. There's just layers and layers of them, and then he asks your perceptual system, he says, here, focus on this one; there's this little interesting thing happening. It's partly patterned and predictable, but not too much, because then it's like a computer; it's patterned and predictable, but it has this little edge of novelty on it — and that's interesting; that novelty keeps you gripped, and you can pick out the patterns.

It's as if you're turning them into auditory objects. Well, with Bach, you can do that at 10 levels at the same time. It's an analog; it's an analog of the real world. You get that as soon as you stop thinking of the real world as a simple place of objects. It's not; it's a complex place of patterns, and those patterns shift and change with different — in different situations and with different temporal frames of reference, and that's what music is telling you.

That's why it's so deeply meaningful because music says to you, here, this is actually the structure of the world beyond your simple perceptions. This is the structure of the world.

Well, that's kind of what I figured out when I was making this thing. You know, I wanted it to kind of rotate a bit; I don't know if it's successful. It's actually a cube that's set on edge, so that's the edge of the cube there, and so you can see into the cube. It's a spiral at the same time, and then it's a tunnel. Imagine a tunnel that's going back to a point, and it's fragmented into these four things here, and so it's like things are bursting out of the middle of this tunnel.

And that's what music is like, right? There's this just constant onslaught of new complex patterned forms. I thought, what does that mean? It means something. Listen to music; think this means something. I can feel it, like I can experience it, and I say, well, if you experience it, it's real.

How you might think, well, the meaning of music isn't real. Well, it depends on what you mean, right? It depends on your presuppositions. I think what means things is real.

There's this old idea, you know, this — it's a funny little turn of phrase, but I like it. You know, materialists, they think the world's made out of matter. Right? Well, this perspective isn't predicated on that idea. This perspective is predicated on the idea that reality is made out of what matters, and music expresses what matters.

Well then, you think, well, is there any reason to think that way? Well, and I would say, well, Solzhenitsyn — he said, taking a page from Dostoevsky, said, "Beauty will save the world."

It's a funny thing, because Solzhenitsyn is actually one of the people who helped save the world. Because his truth was at least in part responsible for knocking down the tyranny in the Soviet Union. You know, so maybe he's someone worth listening to.

What's meaning worth? Well, if you listen to music, you know you can experience what music does to you. It's direct; it's in your own experiential field. The problem is you can't exactly quantify or qualify it by referring to other people because it's a personal experience. But just because it's a personal experience doesn't mean it isn't real. Pain's real, or isn't it?

I tell you, if you're in enough pain, you're not going to be rationally arguing about that point. You know, we have an idea in our culture that it's what we know that saves us in a way. You know, that keeps us able to cope with all of the pressures of being alive, and that's true. You know, what we know is very, very useful, but it's not useful enough because no matter how much you know, there are certain problems that you still have.

And they're — they're eternal problems. There are the problems that you're fragile in all sorts of ways: mentally fragile, physically fragile, emotionally fragile. You know, you're not as good-looking as you might be, etc., etc. And no matter how much you know, none of that's really going to change.

And so you find cold comfort in knowledge, and I'm not putting down knowledge; knowledge is a great thing, but it's not enough. And so then you think, well, what do you have except what you know? And then I would say what you don't know, and there's a lot of that, right? You're never going to run out of what you don't know.

And then I would say, well, then maybe what makes the difference between having a life that is acceptable and one that's resentful and full of hatred is what sort of relationship you establish with what it is that you don't know. There's always more to learn, and you see in fairy tales and in religious mythology, people are always exhorted to be humble.

It's a very annoying thing to be, I would say. But there's a funny — there's a twist on that; it's a very interesting notion because the humble person isn't exactly meek. The humble person is someone who knows that the expanse of what they don't know supersedes the expanse of what they do know, and so that it's in the encounter with what's not known that all the real information — that's where all the action takes place.

And you kind of know that because when you're really interested in something and it grips you, you know you're right on the edge of where all the information is coming from, right? That's what makes it exciting. You know something, but you're on the trail of something you don't know, and that really grips you, and it should grip you because that's where you're getting all the new information.

And I think what music does, as far as I'm concerned, is it speaks to us about what we don't know. It says, look, there's outside of our presuppositions — there's this domain that is constantly patterned and informative and meaningful. If you're open to it in the appropriate way, which is to pay attention to the limitations of your knowledge and to watch what you're doing in more than a merely intellectual sense, that this unknown patterned expanse is richly informative and sustaining.

I think that every time you listen to a piece of music and it grabs you, that's what it's telling you. And I also think, you know, that now you don't know what to say, but there's lots of things you don't know to say. You don't know how to keep your heart beating; you don't know how to walk. I mean, the list of things you don't know is a very long list, and the mere fact that you don't know it doesn't mean that it isn't true.

Well then, you ask yourself with regards to your relationship with something like music: is what it says real or not? And I would say, like pain, what music tells you is so real that it makes other things that are real seem to pale in comparison.

Well, you know, I like music a lot, so maybe that's an experience that’s idiosyncratic to me. But then you have to explain, I suppose, why music has had such a powerful grip on our culture. It's funny because I read a book on evolutionary psychology a week ago written by Steven Pinker. It's this big thick book; there's like one little thin chapter at the end devoted to aesthetics, music, and religion.

I thought that's pretty interesting, you know, because for some people like aesthetic, religion, and, well, let's say philosophy is like this much of the book, with the rest of it being this much. [Music]

And I'm not really interested in debating that. What I am interested more in saying is that there is a way to understand what it is that our aesthetic experiences tell us, but what they tell us isn't in the language that we normally speak. The language that aesthetics — toxin has something genuine to offer us; it's not epiphenomenal, it's not derivative, it's not secondary; it's fundamental and primary.

It's about what things mean and how to act, and for us, that's a big deal. You see we need to know how to act, and the arts tell us that, and music tells us that in the most comprehensive and abstract way. It still grips you, though; it grips your body, makes you move. It's abstract, but it's concrete at the same time, and you can't argue it away.

If you experience it, you can see exactly what it means, and I think that when you listen to music, what you experience is what you should experience in relationship to reality. And I think it's that observation that does for you what it is that music does for you, and all great art does that, and all great literature, and I would say there's no reason not to assume it's real.

That's it. [Applause] Uh, if music be the fruit of love, play on.

According to Peterson, existence is made up of infinite hierarchical landscapes of patterns, and it is only through focusing the lens of your perception that you actually make any sense of existence at all. The way that you look at the world is guided by your wants, and the way that the world looks at you depends on what you want.