Dragons, Divine Parents, Heroes and Adversaries: A complete cosmology of being

This title I didn't really realize I'd be at speaking to an audience that actually included witches and wizards. So yeah, well I'll probably meet them in question period, that'd be my guess. So can you all hear me? One of you can't hear me? How's that? That's better, okay. All right, good.

So as you can plainly see, the title of this talk is "Dragons, Divine Parents, Heroes, and Adversaries: A Complete Cosmology of Being." Sounds dreadfully new age to me, but it's not. New age people are very creative, but they can't think critically. But I can think critically, so this is a creative theoretical enterprise conjoined with the capacity to tell the difference between bad ideas and good ideas. And hopefully what I'm going to talk to you about are the greatest ideas that humanity has ever produced.

There are also ideas that we don't understand well, and whose highest level of formal development we risk forgetting, because we're criticizing things that we invented as a species but that we cannot understand rationally. And we're predisposed to believe that ideas that we can't understand rationally have to be wrong. Sometimes that's true, but sometimes we're just not smart enough to understand them.

I can give you an example of something that we're not really smart enough to understand. We're not really smart enough to understand why people would line up for four nights for ten blocks to watch Star Wars. You know, I mean, they won't do that for a lecture, and they wouldn't pay money. And so, you know, Star Wars, for example, is naturally interesting, and people just take that for granted. But the fact that people will line up to engage voluntarily in a ritual activity of that sort is a manifestation of something that's very deep in the human psyche that we do not comprehend well.

So I'm going to talk to you about what I like to think of as the grammar of belief. I got interested in this back in the mid-80s. My interest was driven mostly by an interest in global warfare that was ideologically motivated, and also atrocity. Warfare was not so difficult to understand in some sense, because you can map it onto animal territoriality. But atrocity in the service of ideology is a whole different thing.

That's certainly clear that, for example, in World War II when the Nazis had to make a choice, perhaps between winning the war and accelerating the rate at which they were killing Jews, they chose the latter. And it's very difficult to understand that using a model based on animal territoriality. I started reading about belief systems widely in political writings and economic writings, religious writings, psychological writings—anywhere I could find a thread that I thought was promising.

I read a lot of Jung, I read a lot of Freud, almost all the great clinical psychologists, a lot of Solzhenitsyn and a lot of George Orwell. They're all people who, as far as I could tell, had something very original to say. And out of that I learned to understand why people need belief, why it's actually inevitable. Faith is inevitable in part because your knowledge is finite, and so you have to take some things for granted or you fall into an infinite regress.

What maybe constituted the difference between pathological belief and non-pathological beliefs—and those are terms, by the way, which I think can be defined technically—constitutes a statement that runs contrary to the presupposition, say, of moral relativism. I'm definitely not a moral relativist. I think it constitutes a—I think the motivation for moral relativism fundamentally is the desire to abdicate responsibility.

Even though you can make very strong intellectual cases for why moral relativism is correct, the intellectual case and the actual motivation have nothing to do with one another. However, I've also found out something else which is quite interesting, and I don't know how much I can touch on it tonight, but I don't think that Newton and Darwin are commensurate. I think that most modern people are Newtonians, not Darwinians, and I think that you can understand the grammar of belief, which is religious in nature, using Darwinian principles, but it means that you have to give up your Newtonian presuppositions.

So I think I can make that argument implicitly with what I'm doing as I progress tonight. So the first thing I'm going to tell you is that it's necessary for you to look at the world through a limited frame of reference. The reason for that is you're not very smart. Your consciousness can only handle about four bits of information per second. It's not very much, given that the number of bits of information coming at you from the external world are, for all practical purposes, infinite.

You're like Aldous Huxley suggested—your brain seems to be primarily a reducing agent. Your body is a reducing agent as well, because there are lots of things that you just can't detect. And then the room that you're sitting in is a reducing agent, because it's keeping all sorts of things out that you would otherwise have to deal with. And the stability of this city is a reducing agent, because we're not going to be stampeded by barbarians with any luck at every moment.

We deal with the complexity of the world, in part, by inhabiting a sequence of reducing structures until the world is reduced enough so that we can actually deal with the minute elements of it that we can comprehend at any one moment. And those elements we comprehend are not the familiar objects of objective reality. In fact, animals and people included aren't much interested in objective reality.

We're interested in pragmatic reality. Pragmatic reality is the reality that you act on, not that you perceive. And because we're embedded in bodies and because we're biological organisms and because we're concerned with survival and reproduction, among other things, how to act is a much more important question for us than what is the world constituted of. How to act, in some sense, is also the prime Darwinian question, right?

Because if you act wrongly, from a Darwinian perspective, you end up dead before you can reproduce. So Darwinism is a pragmatic theory. In fact, the American pragmatists on the North American east coast recognized that very short period of time after Darwin’s studies were published. They recognized the connection between pragmatism as a theory and Darwinian theory instantaneously.

So the world that we inhabit, given that we're alive and given that what's selected us to act is actually a pragmatic world, and the objects of pragmatic worlds aren't objects—they're tools and obstacles, and they have valence a priori. They have value a priori. From the Newtonian perspective, you look at the world and then you think about the world that you see, the objects of the world that you see, and then you evaluate them and then you act.

And that is not how your brain works. It's just wrong. You might see the value of things before you see the object itself. I mean, there are people, for example, who are blind—they have blindsight. They can recognize emotions on faces without knowing they can see. So that's partly because their retinas are attached to the amygdala. Your retina is attached to a lot of your body, not just your visual cortex. It's attached to your spinal cord. It's attached to your nervous system at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.

And so you can use your eyes to detect things that you don't know you're seeing. So, and what, in some sense, what you often detect under those circumstances is valence, value. So you're very good, for example, at detecting teeth and predatory eyes, and the reasons for that are self-evident. Fundamentally, this is the smallest unit of meaning that makes up a referential frame.

I think it has three elements, one of which links the mind to the body. Actually, the mind-body problem isn't that difficult to solve once you take a pragmatic—once you look at how the brain works from a pragmatic perspective, because then your consciousness is fundamentally something that's grounded in action. And you can understand the transition between consciousness and action as a sequence of analyses that are increasingly action-oriented.

I'll talk to you about that a little bit later, but the basic framework is something like this. And you're always looking at the world through this framework, and the framework has as one poll where you are and what you're doing, where you are now. So that's point A. You're always trying to get from point A to point B, because you're a linear creature and you're embodied.

So you're moving, and so fundamentally what you're looking at the world through is a sequence of maps. And maps tell you how to get to where you want to go. And so the map specifies where you are, because obviously you can't get anywhere if you don't know where you are. And many people, of course, are confused about where they are, so they don't get anywhere.

And you also have to know where you're going, and that's point A and point B. And every time you look at the world, you're looking through a framework that has those two valued points implicit in your cognitive structure. Generally, what you think is where you're going is better than where you are, because otherwise why would you go there?

Now some people do choose to go to places that are worse than where they are, but they're a special case. You probably live with some of them. Now when you're going from point A to point B, fundamentally you have to move. Now movement is not abstract. Movement is what you do with your body. And so once your abstract representation transforms itself into action, you're no longer in the realm of abstraction.

So in order to get from one place to another, you have to know where you are, and you have to know where you're going. And then you have to walk, fly, run, roll—you have to perform some sort of embodied action to get there. And of course you have conscious control over your voluntary muscular system, but underneath that you don't really have anything at all, right?

You can move your arm; you have no idea what muscles you're moving. So your conscious representation of your body grounds out basically at voluntary movement of the larger muscle systems. So now you might ask, well what does specify where you're going? And the answer to that, in large part, is biology, but biology in a complex manner.

And this is where higher order morality starts to become a concern. You share with other animals all the way down the phylogenetic chain various forms of implicit motivation. And you know, you can kind of lump those; it's arbitrary. I lump them into self-maintenance motivations and self-propagation motivations. You know, you could cut that in different ways.

Like I said, it's more conceptual than based on, say, anatomy, but it'll do. Self-maintenance—you don't want to get too hot, you don't want to get too cold. Your hypothalamus deals with that. Very old part of the brain; it's way more important than your cortex. You can take the whole cortex off a female cat and as long as you keep it in a cage and it has its hypothalamus, it can pretty much behave like a cat, except that it's hyper-exploratory, which is the last thing you'd expect from an animal with no brain.

You can't be too hot; you can't be too cold. You got to regulate your water intake, you have to eat, you have to deal with the consequences of eating, you have to be with other people. There's a play circuit—a specialized play circuit; there's a specialized erotic circuit; there's a specialized circuit for exploration, which is about half of what the hypothalamus does, by the way.

Those systems, they've often been conceptualized as drives, but they're not really that. They're more like isolated one-eyed personalities. They’re like Cyclops—they want one thing. Now they're not stupid, but they're not very amenable to argument. So when you're hungry, you're hungry. And you know, another motivational system might object to that, but—and that happens frequently—which is partly why people are often confused, and also why you need a cortex, because you know, you need a cortex to allow the competing motivational systems to array themselves properly and harmoniously across time, so that they all get their due instead of fighting like two-year-olds in a room, because two-year-olds are basically hypothalamic.

You know, and so they're lots of fun, but they're not organized, and they're not social at all. So what happens with the motivational systems very deep in your brain is they specify the value of where you are, so that one of the values might be, "I'm thirsty," and then they tune your perception so that things that are associated with the quenching of thirst are much more likely to be picked up by your perceptual system.

And they bias your perceptual processing and your valuation towards the improvement of that motivational lack. And so you can't really think of them as drives, because they're way more complicated than that. They specify where you are, so there's an element of self-consciousness that's associated with that, "I'm thirsty," and they specify a target usually using fantasy.

You know, you get thirsty, you think, "Well, what would I like to drink?" And you eat a little fantasy about maybe a glass of juice or a bit of water or something like that. And then your nervous system is tuned, and then you walk into the kitchen and you ignore everything that's irrelevant to the search for liquid, and you focus in on everything that's relevant to the search for liquid. And that means you're so blind, you cannot believe it.

I mean, there's been many experiments now that have shown that you can do things like—I'm sure some of you have seen this—you can introduce a gorilla into a basketball game and 60 or 70 percent of the people watching, as long as they're paying attention to the ball, they won't see the gorilla. And it's not like a little tiny gorilla that's somewhere off in the corner. It's like main center, six feet high, beating its chest. And even when you know that, if something else changes in the background, you won't see that either.

So as far as you guys know, that carpet could be changing colors 15, 20 times a minute. You wouldn't even notice it unless you had some weird obsession with carpets. So okay, so that's the beginning, in some sense, of a universal system of values, right? And I can tell you how universal this is. I always have to tell this story because it's so damn funny, I just can't believe it.

So one of the things that your brain is very concerned with is relative status. That's wired in, by the way—which is partly why relative poverty is often such a social problem. People hate being low in status, especially men. Well, the male status hierarchy is a bit different than women, and women are pretty sensitive to status too, but they use different markers.

Anyways, part of what happens when your status goes up is your brain serotonin levels go up, and when your brain serotonin levels go up, you're less irritable and experience less negative emotion per unit of uncertainty or threat. And so when you demean someone and you interfere with and lower their presumed status, as far as a very primordial circuit is concerned, you alter the system that regulates their emotions.

And they hate that. People hate that more than anything, and it's an unbelievably archaic circuit. You can kind of tell this because depressed people basically act like they're low status. And depressed people are depressed about everything. Now it's not easy to be depressed about everything, right? And so the fact that that's the case means that whatever's going astray has to be very primordial, because it affects everything.

Anyways, people often use antidepressants to cure depression; hence their name. Antidepressants decrease the rate at which serotonin is taken back up by the neurons that produce it. Well, 300 million years ago, crustaceans emerged, and crustaceans live in dominance hierarchies even though they're not particularly social. And if one lobster fights with another and gets defeated, then he won't fight with another lobster even when he beats for 20 minutes, unless you give them antidepressants, in which case, he'll fight again right away.

The reason I'm telling you this is because the status structure that underlies your being—not just your brain, but your being—is so old, you share it with crustaceans. So you mess with it at your peril. It's not learned by no means. So anyways, you wander around inside one of these little frames, going from point A to point B all the time.

And one of the annoying things about life—and this is sort of the Sisyphus story—is that as soon as you climb from Point A to Point B and you get there, then there's another Point A and another Point B. And that's kind of interesting too, because one of the things that suggests is that getting somewhere isn't really what people want, because as soon as you get somewhere, then you're done going there, and then you have to get somewhere else.

So in some sense, it seems, it's an accomplishment. Another sense, it's just the next rock up the mountain. Now you all know this because you graduated from university, and that was a good day. But the next day you weren't a university student, you were some unemployed loser. And so, and that's, you know, that sets up a whole new set of problems, right? And I mean, that's how the frame shifts.

And when the frame shifts like that, then the value of everything shifts around it. So it turns out that people are actually more interested in getting from Point A to Point B than they are in actually being at Point B. And almost all of the positive emotion that you feel, which is related to dopaminergic circuitry, by the way, you experience in relationship to the pursuit of a valued goal rather than to the attainment of the goal.

The attainment of the goal actually satisfies you, or more specifically, it satisfies that motivational circuit, but then the damn thing just shuts off and another one starts yelling at you. So it's like a perverse form of victory. So one answer to that that's universal in some sense is that you should establish a relationship with a transcendent value, because it never runs out of motivational power.

You can see an example of that, a popular example in popular culture, in the Pinocchio movie, which I'm—how many of you have seen that? Yeah, is anybody not seen it? That's amazing. Anyways, in the Pinocchio movie, one of the things that happens is when Geppetto wishes that his son becomes a fully developed individual instead of a damn puppet, which is a good thing for a parent to wish, by the way, he wishes upon a star.

And the star signifies something of transcendent value. And so the meaning of that fundamentally is that if you want to raise your child to be an independent being, then you better set your sights on something transcended, or it won't happen. And believe me, there's lots of times it doesn't happen. So part of the utility of a transcendent value is that it never loses its motivational effectiveness.

Now you might say, well that's no proof that there are transcendent values. It's like, yeah, that's true, but you know there's more to the story. Okay, so when you're in one of these little stories—which is basically what they are—they're the simplest story. I was one place; I went by this means to another place. That's the simplest story, it's not that exciting.

Much more exciting story is I was going from point A to B and something weird happened, and then I didn't know where I was, and then I was like in chaos for, you know, two years, and then I figured out how to climb out of it. Everybody likes that story, right? That's a death and rebirth story, by the way, or a fall from paradise story with a regaining of paradise at the end. You know, it's an archetypal story because everyone lives it.

And so anyways, when you're in one of these little story frames of reference, what you see in front of you are really things that one of the best scientists who ever studied visual perception called the ecological approach to visual perception. He called them affordances. An affordance is something that affords you something, and affordances can be positive or negative. I like to think about them as tools or obstacles.

So, for example, if I need to make a beeline for that door, you guys are all instantly obstacles. And the way I would respond to that, like implicitly, is that you'd all be negative. So imagine we just said fire. Well, you were people the minute before that, but the minute after that, you're obstacles. And your emotional reactions to the people that are in front of you are going to reflect that.

Now you all know that because you drive. You know, and once you're encapsulated in your little insectoid shell and don't have to deal with the immediate responses of other people, you're going to treat them like obstacles. And like, you know, demonic obstacles at the drop of a hat. And you know, that's pretty much automatic behavior.

So tools are things that get you to where you want to go. And remember, you know, human beings are tool-using animals par excellence, right? We're so tool-using that that's what we see. It's built right into us. We're always scanning the world for tools. When you look at gravel, for example, what you actually see are throwing-sized rocks.

That's why they manifest themselves as that kind of object in the environment. You know, you're built at a certain level of resolution, and the way your nervous system parses up the world is into things that are useful for you and things that aren't. And those are not objects. The whole idea of object is a very, very modern derivative of that much more primordial system, and it's by no means clear at all that our notion of object is more real than the notion of affordance. In fact, as far as your brain is concerned, objects—no one cares about objects; what your brain cares about is affordances.

And what your brain is adapted to is the world as a set of affordances as obstacles. And if you're a Darwinian, it's very difficult to escape the conclusion that what selected you is reality. And so if the reality that selected you shaped you so that what you see are affordances and obstacles, or you die, then it's a perfectly real proposition—perfectly reasonable proposition to state that what reality is, in fact, is a set of affordances, tools, and obstacles.

And that is how your brain works. By the way, when you look at, say, I look at that projector, maybe I'm thinking about picking it up. What happens is my eyes activate the part of my motor cortex that would adjust my hand to grip it like that, and so part of what I understand as the projector is a grippable object. And that's not a secondary derivation. I don't see the object and then think this is how I would grip it. It's like that would take forever.

You know, you'd never catch a baseball if that's what you were doing. It's like, "Oh, a round object," and then it’s clunk; you know, it's like that's just not going to work. Your nervous system is nowhere fast enough to do that consciously. You're using reptile circuitry to catch baseballs; the mammalian stuff is too damn slow. So you catch the ball often, especially if someone pitches it fast, before you can even see it; you just think you saw it—you see it after you caught it.

The case with tennis players too—they what they seem to do is judge where the ball is going to go by the angle of the racket, because if they wait till the ball is off the racket, they can't move fast enough to hit it back. They don't have the reflexes for it, so they can't move the neural messages fast enough to do it.

Okay, so basically, the world lays itself out as tools and obstacles, and you know, obstacles make you feel bad. But like, let's say I'm looking at this room and I'm thinking to you guys as obstacles. You might say, well, how bad does that make me feel? And the answer to that is, well, not very bad, because all I have to do is, you know, make a circuitous route and I can get to the door.

So then the fact that you're obstacles is a very minor impediment to the execution of my plan, and as a consequence, it will produce a correspondingly low level of negative emotion. So you can think of those as known unknowns—in Rumsfeld’s terms, known unknowns aren't that big a problem because you can plan for them. And you might have a plan that's an alternative plan that you could put in place in case they show up.

What people really don't like are unknown unknowns. And unknown unknowns leap at you from places that you wouldn't expect, because otherwise you would have planned for the damn things. So they're the things that are always like poking their beak up at you when you least expect it. They're just, like, say, serpents in the Garden of Eden. That might be one way of thinking about it.

You can't keep the damn snakes out of the garden. And that's because you can't make a bounded area and keep the complexity out of it; the complexity always sneaks back in. Try protecting your children from the internet, for example. You can't make a bounded circumstance and get rid of all the complexity; it always comes sneaking back in.

So what would be an unknown unknown? This is a good one. Here you have an intimate relationship— you’ve had it for 10 years; you trust your partner. So what does that mean? You know where you are, you know who you are, and you have a pretty good idea of who—of where you're going. And then one day you'll find out that your partner has been cheating on you, not with one person, but with three people, and for the whole 10 years.

Well, hypothetically, that comes as a shock, although you may have ignored many intimations that such might be the case. Irrelevant, let's say it comes as a shock. Well, what happens to you? Well, you don't know where you are; you don't know where you've been. That's interesting, eh? Because you think you know where you've been because you've already been there, but all of a sudden something can happen so that you are so flipped over that you don't even know where you were.

So that means in some sense the past is dependent on the present. A very peculiar thing. You also have no idea where you're going in terms of not knowing where you are. That's deep, eh? Because you might think, well, I thought I was in a marriage—that turns out to be wrong. I thought I knew who my wife or husband was—that turns out to be wrong. I concluded on the basis that I knew my wife that I knew something about women—that turned out to be wrong.

I thought I was in a relationship with someone I could trust—that is wrong. I don't know enough about trust; I'm obviously too gullible. And so what that does is throw virtually everything that's ever happened to me into severe doubt, right? That's the emergence of chaos. And that's this—sometimes you're going from Point A to Point B and something you don't expect manifests itself in the middle of your plan.

But it's not such a catastrophe because you can just work around it, and then sometimes something pops up and like—you just do not have a plan anymore. And so then you might ask yourself just exactly where you are when you don't know where you are, and I would say that's a place. And it's actually a place that's well documented in classic religious and mythological stories: that's chaos.

The Taoists, for example, they believe that the world is made out of chaos and order. Well, order—that's where you are when what you do gets you what you want. Chaos—that's where you are when you have no idea what's going on. And you might ask, well, is there a way that you should act when you're in chaos? And the answer to that is there better be, because it's a place you're going to visit several times during your life. And everyone visits that; that's why it's an archetypal story.

That's the descent to the underground. The underground is that horrible place that lurks underneath all of our presuppositions. It's the frigid lake underneath the thin ice that everybody's skating on. And it's something that can manifest itself at any moment. That's partly why in the Taoist symbol, the black paisley is chaos, by the way, and the white paisley is order. In the order paisley, there's a little black dot. Well, that's because order can turn into chaos and does at any moment.

And the reverse is also true; chaos can turn into order at any moment, and insight will do that for you. You know, alcoholics report that when they hit bottom, it's like there's a catalysis, and they look at the world in a different way. You know, now they're a new person; they're back from the underground—they've risen from the dead, so to speak.

And it's partly because what looks like your right hemisphere is pretty good at inferring patterns in novel and chaotic places. It's kind of keeping track of things that happen to you that are anomalous, and it makes alternative maps of the world that are there for you to rely on, at least to some degree, if that ever becomes necessary. Now you might ask yourself, how upset should you be when something that you don't expect happens?

Now it turns out that that is really a difficult question to answer because what the problem is is that when something you don't expect happens, you don't know what it is. And so then you might say, well, how upset should you get? And the answer to that is, you don't know. And so what happens is, first of all, you've got some built-in approximators. One would be your genetically determined level of neuroticism, which is basically sensitivity to negative emotion.

If you're more sensitive to negative emotion, you're going to manifest more psychophysiological preparation per unit of threat or uncertainty—which is to say some people get more upset about the same thing than other people do. Now who's right? Well, if you—I don't know—you wake up in the morning and there's a little ache in your side, it's like, well, what is that—sore muscle or cancer? You don't know.

And if you're hypochondriacal, well, it's going to be cancer, and sometimes the hypochondriac is right, and so he's the one that lives when he goes to the emergency room and finds out exactly what's going on. So it's an unanswerable question.

Now the other way that your brain determines how upset you should be is by calculating your position in the dominance hierarchy, because the higher you are in the dominance hierarchy, the more resources you have at your disposal, and so the less upset you have to get when anything horrible happens. So if you're barely clinging to the bottom of the social structure, you can be sure that your brain is going to estimate any anomalous occurrence as a catastrophe, which is why people don't like being at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy.

And it's also why people who are there die a lot sooner. They do; they die a lot sooner regardless of their absolute level of wealth. It's relative deprivation that counts. Okay, so here's a bit of a clue about how else your brain might calculate how upset you should be. Here's a little map of me when I'm doing something that I frequently do, which is to write a manuscript.

So you might say, well, what are you doing when you're writing a manuscript? And that turns out to be a very complicated question. It's like, what are you doing when you read a book? Well, you're writing letters, or typing them; you're typing words, you're typing phrases, you're typing sentences, you're typing paragraphs, you're typing the structure that the paragraphs fit into—that would be the essay.

Okay, then you're me, anyways. I'm practicing science because I usually write scientific manuscripts, and that's part of embodying my professorial role. And then that's part of hypothetically being a productive citizen, although some of you might differ with that given that I'm a professor.

And then perhaps on the outside of that—or this is what I think is on the outside of that—is I'm confronting the unknown. And you might say, well, what are you really doing when you're writing a sentence? And the answer to that is you're doing all of these things better or worse. And if you're doing a really good job of writing a sentence, you're doing all of them at once.

And that would be one of the things that would make the sentence particularly meaningful. Now if something anomalous occurs, well, let's say the T on my typewriter gets stuck. Well, that's going to irritate me because then I can't type a sentence. Now it's not going to irritate me too much, because, you know, it doesn't really interfere with my ability to be a productive citizen. So I'm going to estimate the magnitude of how upset I should be when something unknown occurs by estimating where in the hierarchy of action that anomaly is disruptive.

Okay, so let me run you through this again. So let's say, um, what's a good person? And you might think of that from an objective perspective, but that would be a mistake, because quality like good is a pragmatic quality and it's based on action, not on object.

So here's how you decompose being a good person. So a good person is a good parent. More than that, that's a subcomponent, right? A good parent is someone who has a job and takes care of their family, and then a person who takes care of their family is like, they can play with the baby or they can complete a meal. These are abstract concepts. You can't tell a four-year-old, "Make a meal," and the reason you can't is because they don't know the subordinate components of making a meal.

You can say, "See that fork?" Hopefully, they know what a fork is. "See that fork?" "Yes." "Pick up that fork and bring that fork to the table." And put it there. They can do that because their nervous system is organized enough to operate at that level of abstraction. But they can't do something like make a meal, which is, you know, if you got a three-year-old, you can't put them in their room and you say, "Clean up your room." They'll just look at you, and then when you come back in half an hour, they'll look at you again.

You can say, "Hey kid, see that teddy bear?" "Yeah, pick up the teddy bear and put it on that space in the wall." And then once you teach the three-year-old how to do a hundred of those things, and they got it, they've got little motor routines. You can say, "Clean the room." You can encapsulate that entire set of motor routines within the higher order concept.

So if you're being a good person, part of that is, well, maybe you're making a meal. And part of that would be, well, you're cutting up the vegetables. But then things get interesting because when you're cutting up the vegetables, what you're actually doing is gripping something and moving. And then that's no longer abstract, right? That's where your conceptual philosophical presuppositions, like "Be a good person," hit the level of embodied material reality—that's the dissolution of the mind into the body.

Now if someone says to you, "You should cut those vegetables more thinly," that might irritate you, but if they say, "You're a bad parent," maybe observing the same phenomena, then you're going to get into a fight with them. And the reason for that is obviously if it's just a matter of cutting the vegetables thinner, all you have to do is make a minor modification in the hierarchy that constitutes your self-representation, or really yourself.

It's not just a representation, but if you're not a good parent, it's like if that's true, you've got a lot of repair work to do—a lot of your world is falling apart. And as soon as things fall apart—which they always do—you're in chaos. And as soon as you're in chaos, then your body defaults to emergency preparation, and you're stressed. And if you're stressed long enough, then you die.

And so you don't like that stress. Say when your body gets stressed, what happens is, because it doesn't really know what's going on, it prepares for everything. That's the generalized stress response; cortisol production does that. Cortisol production is good; it wakes you up in the morning. But if it's chronic, you get old.

Like it's so general in its negative actions that the best way to conceptualize its detrimental long-term effect is that it accelerates aging. So it makes you more likely to have heart disease and cancer and depression and Alzheimer's and diabetes and obesity. That'll do; it's enough. Any of those are enough to kill you.

All right, so there's a hierarchy—that's a hierarchy of values. The higher the value, the less you want to have it disrupted. Now there's a psychologist named Piaget. Some of you might know about him. Piaget was very interested in what happens to value structures and their hierarchical organization once they have to apply outside of the confines of a body.

So here's a way of thinking about it: two-year-olds are basically hypothalamic—that's why they're so much fun. First they're happy, then they're sad, then they're hungry, then they're tired. You know, they just zip from one pretty straightforward and rather awe-inspiring motivational state to another. But at two, they can't play. They can play by themselves, but they can't play with other children.

They can't get that until they're three, and they need to get it by the time they're three because if they don't get it by the time they're four, they will never get it. And then you have an anti-social kid who's going to be an outsider for his entire life, and there isn't anything you can do about it. So that has to happen between two and four.

So what happens at about age three is that the kid learns how to play a game with another person. And what that game is, is fundamentally the development of the ability to share a frame of reference, which is what you're doing when you play Monopoly. It's like it's stupid to play Monopoly. Obviously, who cares if you have a whole pile of counterfeit paper, right?

But it doesn't matter, because the way you're constituted is that your brain will treat anything you act like constitutes a valuable goal as if it's a valid framework of reference. And if it couldn't do that, A: you couldn't abstract, and B: you could not get along with other people.

So you can sit around the table and you can say, "Let's pretend that Monopoly is a reasonable facsimile of reality," which you wouldn't say, but it's what you mean. And everybody says, "Yes, that would be amusing." And so then you set your goal, which is to get all the little hotels and all the money, and poof, your emotions go along for the ride.

And what's so interesting about that is you can get everybody into the game. And so one of the things that's really interesting about people is that we can establish a shared fictional frame of reference, and it organizes all our emotions so they're predictable. That's also why we can watch movies. You go to a movie, you identify the hero, you figure out what the hero wants—poof, you're the hero.

And the way that works is you don't look at the hero and think about what he's doing and evaluate it emotionally and then feel it; what you do is you specify the hero's goal, and then you map him onto your body and you read off the emotional responses of your own body, and that's how you understand the hero. So it's embodied; you're using your embodiment as a computational device that can run simulations of other consciousnesses, and it does that with the body.

And we like doing that. You can go to a movie and you know you're Brad Pitt for an hour and a half, you know, when you're Brad Pitt doing remarkable things. And that's also how we understand other people; we're very good at that.

So anyways, we have these shared frames of reference. Like when we're playing Monopoly, okay? So children at three learn how to play games. And that means they learn how to organize their own internal motivational states into a hierarchy that includes the motivational states of other people, and that means they can play.

And that's what you guys do when you're out in the world. Like we're playing a game right now; we all know the rules. That's why we can all sit in this room and play the game without fighting with each other. You know, when the room is set up like a theater and we all know the theater game, and so—and the chairs are always facing this way at the moment.

And so that's a hint that you should look forward, and this is raised, so you know the room is basically telling you what to do because it's a stage like all rooms, and because you're smart and socially conscious, you can walk into a staged room and your body knows what to do. And if you're civilized and social, you just do it.

Then all the other primates can predict what you're up to, and they won't kill you. Yeah, well, that's what it means to be part of the same tribe. You know, when people are very peculiar creatures and God only knows what they're up to, but as long as they're playing the same game you are, you don't have to know what they're up to because you can predict what they're going to do, and you understand their motivational states.

And so part of the building and constructing of higher-order moral goals is the establishment of joint frames of reference that allow multiple people to pursue the goals that they're interested in simultaneously. And then what you have to think about with regards to that is that not all shared frames of reference can manage that.

There's a small subset of them that are optimized so that not only can multiple people play them, but multiple people can play them and enjoy them and do it repeatedly across a long period of time. So it's iterability that partly defines the utility of a higher-order moral structure, and that is not arbitrary; it's an emergent property of biological interactions.

And you might say, well, it's kind of arbitrary because people can do what they want, but it's not arbitrary at all, because a lot of what's constraining your games is your motivational substructure and those ancient circuits that are status-oriented, and they operate within virtually every animal that has a status counter. Creatures organize themselves into dominance hierarchies. The reason they do that is because that works; it's a solution.

It's a solution to the Darwinian problem of existence; it's not just an epiphenomena; it's the real thing. So your environment fundamentally—a huge chunk of your environment—is dominance hierarchy, plus God only knows where you are. And that's order and chaos, and part of the reason that people fight to preserve their dominance hierarchies is because it's better to be a slave who knows what the hell is going on than someone who's thrown screaming and naked into the jungle at night.

And that's the difference between order and chaos, and we like order better than chaos, and it's no wonder. Now we'll invite a little chaos in for entertainment now and then, but it has to be done voluntarily. And generally, you don't want the kind of chaos that upsets your entire conceptual structure. You know, you're willing to fool around on the fringes a little bit, but you know, when the going gets serious, you're pretty much likely to bail out.

And no wonder, now I want to tell you a little bit about this chaotic domain. I can tell you a couple of things about it; it's the underworld of mythology. One of the things that's kind of interesting about the underworld is that it has a suburb, and one of the suburbs of the underworld is hell.

And hell is the place where you end up when everything that you know falls apart, and you get resentful and bitter about it. And that's very, like, one of the things I've noticed in my work as a clinical psychologist, that there's two things that really do people in: three, lying, that's not good.

Apart from that, resentment and arrogance. If you get resentful enough, you end up like Elliot Rodger and all those other people who go on random shooting sprees because they have a disagreement about the structure of the existence and the fact that they ended up hypothetically at the bottom of the heap. So those are real places, and people get stuck in them, and they are not places that you would voluntarily choose to go if you had any sense at all.

And I'll tell you; if you read the accounts of the people who do random mass murder, they'll tell you exactly where they are, and they'll tell you exactly what they're motivated to do. And what they're motivated to do is take as much revenge on existence as they possibly can imagine in the most unfair possible way as fast as they can possibly manage it, and that's their conscious aim.

And it is not a form of insanity; they know exactly what they're doing. They have a precise idea of what they're aiming at, and it's a deep archetypal possession, for lack of a better word. Now I want to show you how some of these things are mapped symbolically. They're not really symbols in my estimation because a symbol implies that something is being represented. You know, that there's a reality behind the representation that's broader than the representation—the symbol is just a shadow of it.

These aren't symbols; they're representations that are as accurate as they can possibly be. I'll start with something that's rather easy to understand. Let's try—where is that? Yes. What happens when you look at the Medusa? You turn to stone. What happens when a rabbit sees a wolf? That's right; it turns to stone. That's right.

The Medusa is a symbol; it's a representation of all those things that make you turn to stone when you look at them. Now look, animals can deal with threat, right? They have instincts to deal with threat. But zebras—maybe there's a bunch of zebras, and they're out there in a herd, and there's a bunch of lions, and they're right there, and the zebras—what are they doing?

They're grazing. And you think, well, those zebras aren't very bright because there's a bunch of lions—like, why aren't they, you know, in the forest building a fort to keep the lions out? But they— the reason they're not doing that is because although they can react to threat, they cannot conceive of the class of threatening objects.

Now human beings can conceive of the class of threatening objects. And so what civilization is, in large part, is an attempt to find a remedy for the class of threatening objects. Now there are representations of those sorts of things—the Medusa is one of them. The reason it's feminine is very difficult to explain, and I don't think I have the time, unfortunately, but you'll have to take my word for it.

You see the little cartoon of Robert Crumb off to the left there? He's got a big edible problem—old Rob Crumb. And the problem with him fundamentally is his mother was something like a giant spider and did everything she possibly could to crush the life out of him, hence his remaining relationship with women.

And so that's part of the reason why femininity can be something that turns you to stone. It's an experience that many men are familiar with, by the way, because the average man is rejected far more often than he's accepted. And since women are the gateway to reproduction, they constitute nature itself, and nature itself tells most men you should go home and stay under your bed.

There's lots of experiments done about this. So, for example, psychologists have an undergraduate woman go out into the concourse and see how long it takes for someone her to find someone who agrees to sleep with her, and that takes like, you know, two seconds after she asks the first man. And then they flip it, you know, and they get your random undergraduate guy to do the same thing. It's well—you can imagine the consequences of that since many of you men have lived through it.

Mother Nature, with a woman, wears the face of Mother Nature, and the face is generally rejecting, especially to men who are low in the dominance hierarchy, by the way, which is one of the things that irritates guys like Elliot Rodger, and one of the things that motivates their desire to take revenge. That's a universal phenomenon. So that's part of the reason that the feminine is nature and why nature, by the way, is Mother Nature.

It's like it's diagnosis of your status is not good enough, and no wonder what seems to have happened fundamentally is that these domains that I talk to you about, which can be represented as chaos and order, say an R from the Taoist perspective, can also be represented as masculine and feminine. And I think the reason for that is that human beings are fundamentally social primates, right?

We're very, very social, and we know that one of the correlates of brain size in primates is social group size, and we also know that most primates, say chimps who were quite closely related to—they don't like go out and investigate leaves and, you know, parent things through microscopes—they spend all their time interacting with other chimpanzees, although they're chewing all the time. They do it because they have a ridiculously ineffective, you know, digestive and eating system.

Their brain is adapted to the social circumstances as the primary reality. So you could say, well, tribe is the primary reality. And then there's a secondary reality, which is all that which is outside the tribe, and that corresponds to chaos in order. Order, in contradiction to chaos, is symbolized by masculine symbols.

And that's, for example, why ideologies like radical feminism presume the existence of a patriarchy. It fits into the symbolic structure of our minds, that idea. And it's true in some sense, because just like in chimpanzee troops, the primary or meta hierarchy that makes up human civilization is fundamentally masculine in its origin and structure.

And so masculine is fundamentally the dominance hierarchy, and feminine is fundamentally all the things that are outside or that challenge the dominance hierarchy. And so it's—and it's a perfectly reason. It's weird, eh? Because our brain is organized to fundamentally apprehend the world in terms of personalities. And that's partly because, you know, as we've emerged over the course of evolution, it's been relatively constant that there were males around and that there were females around and that the males were fathers and that the females were mothers and, you know, that they were both mates as well.

It's a constant of the evolutionary landscape, and that's what our brains evolve to process. And then what happened when we developed the capacity to abstract is we used this underlying social cognitive abstraction structure to start to represent the structure of being itself.

So we could say, well, there's a dominance hierarchy in that society, and that's masculine, and there's all the things that challenge the dominance hierarchy, and they're outside, and they're feminine. The weirdest thing about that, however, is that it actually works. You know, we've gone away with that for some reason; it seems to be perfectly reasonable to map the world in that manner; it keeps us going.

All right, I'm going to try to explain this. This is now a chemical symbol. At the bottom of the symbol, there's this round thing with wings. Do you ever see Harry Potter? Yeah, you know the game Quidditch? You remember what they chase? They chase a gold one of those. All right, so they call that the snitch, I believe.

And there's a little fragment of soul, and it's a very interesting idea, because for the alchemists, the primary element of reality, whatever that was, could be conceptualized as this thing—this round chaos. And what it was conceptualized of, in part, was it was a container from which matter and spirit could emerge.

And you might ask, well, what does that mean? This is what it means. When a child experiences something it can't predict, it does the thing that led to that uncertain outcome over and over and over and over until it can map it. And then you think, well, what did the child do? What the child did was take the domain of that which it did not understand and it transformed it into matter, which is the predictable world of entities and spirit, which is the internal psychological structure that's adapted to that.

And so what the alchemists basically conceptualized was that what exists outside of your conceptual framework is something like unrealized potential. And when you interact with that unrealized potential, you actualize it, and you actualize it into two component elements, one being the material world and the other being your own psychological structure. That's why they conceptualized matter and spirit, the container of matter and spirit, as the ultimate reality.

And out of that emerged something that was quite primordial, which is the dragon. Now one of the things we know—remember in the Genesis story, it's the snake that gives people vision? Remember that? It gives them wisdom, and it also produces self-consciousness. There's a woman named Lynn Isbell who's an anthropologist in LA, and she was very interested in human beings' sight because we can really see; we can see better than any other creature except predatory birds. We can see way better than most primates.

Isbell knew that our tree-dwelling ancestors some 60 million years ago emerged at about the same time as snakes—their younger than lizards, by the way—and that we were preyed upon quite intensely by snakes for tens of millions of years. She also knew that we were good at detecting snakes in the bottom of our visual field, and that we were particularly good at detecting the camouflage patterns of snakes in the bottom of our visual field.

So she did a series of field experiments showing that primate visual acuity was correlated strongly with the presence of predatory snakes in the immediate environment. So the idea that snakes gave us vision is right. Now why is that relevant to this? We were preyed upon for a very long period of time and we developed a neural circuit to deal with predators, and that's the neural circuit that's activated in children when they're terrified about monsters at night.

So the predator entity, which is this dragon, it's like an amalgam of predatory forces, is one of the manifestations of the things that exist outside of the dominance hierarchy, so it's a form of primordial reality. It's not abstract anymore, like the matter and spirit container; it's like the first practical manifestation of what's terrifying and threatening concretely outside that. And so remember, animals can respond to threat, but they can't conceptualize threat as a category.

That's the conceptualization of threat as a category. It emerges from the absolute unknown; it manifests itself as threat. So, for example, if you hear a loud noise behind you or a growl when you're in the forest, the first thing that happens is you don't know what's going on, and that's the initial state of contact with potential. And then if you turn around and you look, that potential manifests itself into something that's predatory, and you have a circuit for that.

And that's the same circuit that we now use to assess anything unexpected that occurs to us. And that circuit had to come from somewhere, and so our capacity to respond to surprising entities is an elaboration—an elaboration up into abstraction of our capacity to identify predators. So that's the next level of reality, and out of that chaotic circumstance comes something that's more human, and that is the emergence of masculinity and femininity out of that more primordial element.

Let me show you two things. This is a map of pragmatic territory as far as I can tell; it's the territory that people actually inhabit. At the first level, it's the square. I called that the dragon of chaos. That's the unknown as such, and it's the thing that you fall into when your conceptual schemes fall apart. What manifests itself out of that is femininity.

And femininity comes in two forms, one is benevolent femininity. An example would be this: you see Mary on the left there. She's in a structure called a mandorla, which from a Freudian perspective has obvious sexual connotations. You see, if you look carefully, that she's standing on a reptile and holding her child away from it. It's a common medieval Christian image, and you can think of it as divine because women spent an awful lot of time doing that with their children over the course of our millions of years of evolution.

And it's something that's sacred because our species depended on that for its survival. This one's even better. This is a medieval image; I love this image. So there's Mary with the Christ child, and she's standing again on a reptile, a predatory reptile, but in the background you see all those weird little shapes. Those are musical instruments, and that they fill space.

And the medieval artist who drew this picture had this intimation that behind the manifestation of something as primary as the protective maternalness of Mary was something like the music of the spheres or a collection of harmonious patterns. And that this figure was constantly emerging out of that background of harmonious patterns across the infinite stretches of time itself, that's a sacred image because it represents something that human society cannot live without.

It's like any society that doesn't regard the Virgin and the child who protects the child from the predatory serpent as a prime element of sacred reality is going to make itself extinct. You know, I could say—for example—that's what's happening to the indigenous populations of Eastern Europe at the moment, where their birth rate is far below replacement.

I'm going to show you another image. This is called a virge uvrant, or an open virgin, and it was a common representation in medieval Europe. And it's a weird representation from a Christian perspective, because it kind of reverses the normal hierarchy of power. What you have here is Mary—she's holding the Christ child when the statue is closed—and then you open her out.

So what you see inside Mary is God the Father, and God the Father is holding Christ in his hands. Now Mary constitutes the superordinate benevolent feminine, and inside her is the structure of culture. So you can think inside nature is the structure of culture, and that's represented in this image by God because he's the ultimate father, obviously, in Christian thinking.

And then the God figure is holding what? A crucified individual? What does that mean? Now all the people around there—kings, queens, commoners—are all gazing at that central figure, which of course is fundamentally what everyone in Western civilization has been doing for 2000 years—not knowing why nature gives rise to culture, culture gives rise to the suffering individual.

Well, that's true enough; it's true for everyone; it's true for life at every point in time. But there's more to the image of the crucifixion, because the crucifixion also represents voluntary acceptance of suffering and voluntary acceptance of death. And it also points to something else that's of paramount importance, which is that there's an element of the human psyche that can die and come back and die and come back.

And that's what happens to you when you encounter a catastrophe, and you make order of it, and you climb back out of the underworld, and your void through life is punctuated by trips to the underworld. And so you're somewhere, and then you go outside that, and then you go somewhere else, and then you go outside that.

And so what happens to people is they generally identify with where they are—order—but order dissolves and collapses, and that reconstitutes itself. So then you might say if you are trying to adapt to the structure of reality itself, instead of identifying with order, you would identify with a process that allowed you to transform yourself across repeated bouts of order and chaos.

And that's what these sorts of images are trying to represent. So let me show you one final idea. There's a Taoist idea that's like this. So the Taoist symbol—you know the Taoist symbol? I already talked to you about it; you've all seen it. Chaos in order, masculine and feminine, constantly in interplay—that's Tao from the Taoist perspective. And Tao is the source of meaning.

So the idea there is that it's the constant interplay between chaos and order that produces the sense of meaning in human beings, and that's true. That is what produces the sense of meaning. You know that, because when you're engaged in a compelling operation, you're partly ordered and secure, and you have one foot out into the unknown.

And the balance is proper. And as a consequence, you're engaged in what you're doing, and as a consequence of that, you lose your self-consciousness. And if you stay engaged in that sort of situation on a continual basis, then you find that your life is meaningful and rich—and that's the best antidote to the fact that life is bounded and full of suffering.

Now, Tao means meaning; it also means journey. And the center of the Tao is the place you're supposed to be—one foot in chaos and one foot in order. And that's the best place to be in the actual environment itself, because the actual environment is better construed as the constant interplay between chaos and order than it is construed as a collection of material objects.

And if you adopt the pragmatic view that points out that there are meta-realities above the mere objects that we perceive, you can also apprehend that our brains are actually adapted to the meta-realities and not the realities, because our brains are like 300 million years old. And what we've done is abstracted out those things that are constant across spans of time that are hundreds of millions of years in length.

And those aren't chairs and tables or automobiles; they’re meta-structures that are much more sophisticated than that, and we ignore that at our peril, because modern people don't believe that meaning exists—they think it's epiphenomenal. There's nothing subjective about our worldview when in fact our nervous systems are tuned so that life is manifesting itself in the most meaningful possible way when you happen to be occupying the precise position between chaos and order that maximizes your security and the development of that security across time.

And that's not—that's the most real thing there is. And to stay in that position is also to accept voluntarily the necessity for a certain degree of suffering, because as you extend your capacities by exposing yourself to the optimal level of the unknown, you're constantly taking yourself apart and rebuilding yourself.

And that's what allows you to thrive, not only in the presence of stability but also in a state that consists of the transformation of that stability. Here's a representation from ancient Egypt. These are representations of Horus.

There's a lot of evidence that many of the ideas we have about Christ are derivatives of Egyptian ideas. Most people who point that out, pointed out in a manner that's aimed at devaluing the ideas that were derived from Egypt because they have an a priori motive, which is a destructive motive. As mythology progresses across the centuries, it transforms itself. It attempts to continually re-encapsulate the primary ideas that the human race has managed to produce about the structure of reality itself.

There are constances across these cultural manifestations, because the reality to which they refer is actually reality. Horus—this is a good lesson, and I'll leave you with this. Horus is the eye. The eye is not the intellect. The intellect is the thing that forces everything into a pre-existing structure, and it crunches reality to do that. It warps it and twists it and it makes people ideological and rigid.

The eye is something completely different. The eye is the thing that pays attention, and your attention is automatically directed to those elements of your experiential field where the most information is manifesting itself. That's why, for example, if you're talking to someone in a bar and there's a TV flickering, you can't help but look at the TV.

The change, the transformation is what your nervous system is attuned to. And the theory is that if you're a follower of Horus, who's the eye and the falcon—because falcons can see and they fly above everything else—if you're a follower of Horus, you pay attention. When you pay attention, you absorb information. When you observe information, you continually transform yourself.

And that keeps you on top of an ever-shifting reality. Doing that is meaningful, and that's what stops you from becoming bitter and cruel, because you know life is suffering. You know, and if you don't have an antidote to that suffering that's real, then you become resentful about the structure of experience. And then you'll do everything you can to take revenge on it, and we saw what happened when people did that in the 20th century.

And it would be a good thing if people woke up and stop doing it. And as far as I can tell—after trying to figure this out for like 30 years—the way that you do that is by paying attention and transforming yourself when it's necessary and stopping the process of identifying with what you already believe. Who the hell cares what you believe?

You should be attending to the things you don't know, which is a much larger space than the things you know. And then you should be construing yourself not as the inhabitant of a sterile and static and already completed structure, but as the thing that lives on the edge of that—that's constantly building and rebuilding it. And then if something happens to your structure, it's not so relevant because that's not what you are; you're the thing that can engage in transformations of structure by paying attention.

And that's what these representations mean. These are Renaissance pictures. You know, they've elevated the entity that voluntarily accepts the necessity of suffering and death, so that's represented by Christ, to the highest position in the heavenly hierarchy. What that idea means is that what should constitute the transcendent value that sits above all other values is your capacity to voluntarily accept the restricted and painful conditions of your life, to face them, and as a consequence of facing them, immediately transcend them.

Now one of the things we know from clinical psychology is that if you have someone who's afraid, they avoid. So what do you do about that? You break down the thing they're afraid of until you find a small unit that they can approach. When they approach it, they learn that they can approach it and that they're more than they thought they were.

And then they can approach the next thing, and then the next thing. And so you take a woman who's got agoraphobia, who can't get in an elevator, and a week later, she can. And then she goes home and has the fight with her husband that she should have had 20 years ago. And the reason for that is that when she's exposed to the things that she's afraid of, instead of running from them, she learns that she's the thing that can be exposed to things she's afraid of.

She doesn't learn that things aren't frightening. Learning that she's the thing that can be exposed to things that are frightening makes her more than the frightening things. And it's certainly possible that we're more than the things that frighten us. If we weren't, we wouldn't be here.

We shouldn't throw these things away before we understand them, and we're in danger of doing that now. So part of what I've been trying to do in my lectures and my work is to point out what our forefathers knew to try to help modern people understand it and to make the case that these things that we think of as non-real representations are more real than anything that we currently comprehend as real.

The consequences of not comprehending them and living by them, as far as I can tell, is that things deteriorate, and they can deteriorate to a point where everything is intolerable for everyone. And that seems to be a sub-optimal destination. So thanks for the invitation.