013 Maps of Meaning: 13 The Force Within (TVO)

You really can’t tell the meaning of someone’s life till the very end. And it’s for the same reason, right, is that how all the pieces fit together in the story or in the life is not necessarily determined until the final moment. And I think that’s part of the reason too, why among Catholics, for example, and Christians in general, there’s an idea that salvation can always be attained, right? Right up to the last moment, no matter what your life was like.

And you think: Well, that’s a pretty cheap trick, you know, because you can run around doing terrible things your whole life, but as long as you can get it together at the last second, then you’re Scot-free. But if you think about it in terms of a story, then you can understand how that could conceivably be the case. And it’s for this reason, of course, that this lecture in particular makes me nervous more than any of the other ones I do, because I’ve been telling you a story that’s basically 40 hours long, right, and its spoken forum, and then who knows how long in its written form.

And it’s complicated to pull it together properly. And that’s partly because, as far as I’ve been concerned, we’ve been talking about issues in psychology that are more difficult than any other. First of all, conceptually, even from a neuropsychological perspective, because I’ve been offering you a model of the way the brain processes the environment, that I think is really novel. And I think it reflects the current state of neuroscience.

And - but more than that, there’s the problem that we’ve been dealing with issues all the way along of life and death, and of war and destruction, and of the possibility for clear-headed optimism, right? and possibility which, as we’ve discussed, more or less escaped Tolstoy, say, for most of his life, right, because when Tolstoy woke up from his delusions, he looked at the world and he said: Well, clearly it’s such a terrible place that, if you’re not looking at it through the veils of illusion, there’s no way that you can do anything but stand in opposition to it once you understand its basic structure, right?

Suffering and innocence suffering, and complete vulnerability, and the whole existential mess that makes up life. Now it turns out that Tolstoy overcame his rationally induced cynicism in a kind of mystical way. He had a dream that he was suspended from some transcendent space by a belt around the middle of his waist, which hung him over a pit of chaos. And in that image, he found comfort. And fair enough, it’s a powerful image.

But it’s not well delineated, right? And it worked well for Tolstoy, and you can see that the image has power, but you can’t-- you can’t grab it with your rational mind. You can’t take it into pieces and analyze it as an argument. And that’s what we do if we’re intellectuals, right? We try to understand the detailed structure of something. And I think the detailed structure of what Tolstoy apprehended as optimistic is actually comprehensible.

And we’ve been working towards that and circling around it the entire course of this lecture series. But I have found with this material that with each circling around the target, it gets clearer and clearer. It’s a funny thing. It’s like you’re looking at something that’s too complicated to see all at once. So you have to look at it from multiple different perspectives, and again and again.

And each time you look at it, it becomes clearer and clearer. And that’s still the case for me when I go through this material. Every time I go through it, I think: Oh yeah, that piece fits there. And that piece fits there. And that’s how that makes sense. And: Oh that’s a lot more remarkable than I thought it was to begin with… and so on. And it seems fundamentally inexhaustible. And of course, that’s what you’d expect from deep, deep stories, right?

Stories that have been around for thousands and thousands of years, wouldn’t have been around for thousands and thousands of years unless they were in some sense inexhaustible. And we’ve talked about some of the processes that might contribute to that inexhaustibility. So at the beginning of the lecture series, I told you to consider the assumption that there was more than one way of looking at the world, right?

There was the standard materialist sort of scientific viewpoint, which was that the world was made up of objects – independently existent, as among them - the objects have no intrinsic value, one way or another. And the issue of meaning per se wasn’t included in that account. And then I said: Well wait, there’s another way of looking at the world, that we spent just as much time developing, that we utilize even more, and that’s the narrative…

That’s the narrative way of looking at the world; to consider the nature of experience rather than the nature of objects as real; to consider your experience as real, even though it includes things that can’t be easily and tangibly identified – things like emotions, which of course you find compelling, sometimes even beyond your will. Things like motivational states, fantasies, ideals, all the things that compel your behaviour and give you some sense that there’s a direction to life.

People who study emotion and perception have come to understand that the act of transforming the world into something simply made out of objects is incredibly difficult. It’s so difficult that we haven’t been able to design machines that can do it at all. It turns out also that when we look at the world, we’re not just looking at it with our visual systems, but we’re looking at it with our motor output systems and our emotions.

So that, when you look at something like a chair, which just stands there for you like an object, it turns out that the mechanical systems – the motor systems – that you would use to use the chair to sit on it are activated during the act of perception. It also turns out sometimes that when you look at something, especially if it’s something you don’t understand and that it’s - and that scares you – you actually react to it; conceptualize it with your body and with your emotions before you have any idea what it is from the perspective of an object.

When you look at the world and when you think about the world, you have to do it from a motivated perspective and an emotionally ridden perspective. You can’t even see the world without being gripped by your motivation and emotional states. And so, the idea that rationality or perception is somehow separate from, or super-ordinate to perception and emotion is just wrong.

We understand now that you can’t even think without being motivated. You can’t see the world without being motivated. And that means you always look at the world through a kind of lens. And the lens is a narrowing lens, and it has to be because the world is so complicated, you can’t see it all at once. You’re only seeing tiny slices of it in time, and tiny slices of it in space.

And even then, you have to narrow it to only those things that are relevant to you at that moment. And we don’t know exactly how you do that. We know that it takes years and years of perceptual work in infancy, say so that you manage to build up an object conception of the world. That’s probably all your doing in the first two or three years of life. And you’re doing it constantly.

And it’s just as complicated as learning language, say, or even more complicated. Most of it’s invisible, and we don’t know how children do that. And by the time they can talk, they’ve already done it. So, they can’t even tell us what they’re doing. It takes a long time to build up an object world.

And when you look at the world - when you go from Point A to Point B - even when you’re doing something as simple as looking for food in the kitchen, you ignore everything about the world that isn’t relevant to making yourself a peanut butter sandwich, and you focus in on those few things that are – the refrigerator, the food, the knives, the cutlery, and so on. And everything else is screened out.

Then, you can’t help but look at the world through that kind of lens. And the lenses change and you can be in different motivational states, and they can change because of internal transformations. You’re not hungry. You’re thirsty. Or you’re not thirsty, you’re interested in someone. Or somebody is telling you a story and then you adopt their motivational framework, and you can see the world through their eyes.

And now, we know the neural machinery for that, and we already talked about that. So, we can toss back and forth these motivational frames of reference and that gives us insight into someone else’s world. You can look at the world endless numbers of ways.

And what you’re trying to do it, out of its infinite richness, so to speak, is to pull out parts of it that are useful for you while you’re moving from Point A to Point B. And this can be a chair, if you want to sit down. But if you want to take a light bulb out of the ceiling, then it’s a stool, or a table. And whether or not it’s a chair, or a stool, or a table depends just as much on what you’re doing as it does on what it is.

And I think that’s part of the reason why human beings can be so infinitely creative, right? For us, the world isn’t fixed. We never know what it’s going to bring forth. So, 100 years ago, if someone would have said: Well, you could build a machine on a wafer a centimetre square out of sand and if you have enough of those machines then everyone in the world can be connected, and everyone in the world can have an infinite library of verbal material, right?

That’s impossible, but it-it’s not impossible. It turns out that silica has those properties, and we can build unbelievably powerful machines out of nothing. And so then, that kind of makes you think about just what this nothing that we’re building things out of is, right? Because it seems to be able to reveal a constant array of properties; properties that are essentially unlimited.

And its capacity to reveal those properties seems to depend as much on our ability to interact with it - whatever that is - as it does on whatever the stuff is. And we know, even from a strict object perception of the world that the stuff that things are made of is a lot more complicated than we had originally presumed, even as materialists, because materialists, realists, their philosophy only holds down to about the subatomic level of analysis – a deterministic worldview.

Below the subatomic level of analysis, there’s nothing deterministic at all. And the stuff that things are made of is so mysterious that we can’t even-- we can’t grasp it. We can’t comprehend it. So it turns out that rather than the story world be, being dependent on the object world, it might be the other way around. The object world is dependent on the story world.

And that implies at least to some degree that the story world is actually more real, whatever that means. And then, I told you that, well, the real problem of life isn’t so much “What do you do when you’re around things that you understand?” The real problem of life is: “What do you do when you encounter something you can’t conceptualize?”

And I think a good recent example of that was the bombing of the World Trade Towers, which people were compelled to watch over and over and over and over. And if you ask someone: Well, what is it that you’re watching? They would say: Well, I’m watching the World Trade Towers fall down but then, you might say: Well, why are you watching it over and over?

And they would say something like: Well, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s happening. And what does that mean? It means something like: Whatever it is that’s happening here - whatever’s being blown apart – exceeds my ability to model. And as a consequence, I have to expose myself to it again and again and again, and again, to try to understand what’s falling.

Like, what’s falling exactly? Is it just the towers? Is it 20,000 people? Is it the financial system of the U.S.? Is it the stability of the western world? Is it the beginning of World War III? Or as the former CIA director just mentioned in the U.S.: The beginning of World War IV. What is it exactly that you’re looking at when something happens that you don’t understand?

And then you say: Well, how do you react to that? And it turns out that you react mostly with your body - not with your mind, not with your perceptual systems, not with your thoughts – but with your emotions and your body. And that means you sweat, and you panic, and you feel depressed, and you feel hurt, and you feel ashamed.

And you’re prepared for a catastrophe, which is stress. And all that’s basically non-cognitive and-- What that kind of means is that, when you encounter something you don’t understand the first manner in which you conceive of it, is embodied; emotional, physical, way before you develop up an object representation, or a cognitive representation.

You may not ever get it. Like, an event like that, or a worse event, can throw someone into a tailspin that’s so extreme that they never get out of it. So you’ll see, for example, sometimes – and this is more true among elderly people if their spouse dies – the probability that they’ll die in the next year - say, from a heart attack or something like that – increases substantially.

Why is that? It’s because their conceptual frame was so dependent on the existence of their spouse – say, someone they’ve lived with for 25 years – that the anxiety and uncertainty caused by their own anomalous disappearance – their death is so extreme – that it sends their body into a physiological state that’s basically unbearable. And that does them in.

And when you start to understand what having your preconceptions rattled really means, then you also start to understand why people are so motivated to protect their ideological territory, right – ideological territory-- that’s how you see the world. That’s your story. And you can’t have your fundaments rattled all the time because it throws everything into chaos, and that puts you in this terrible, panicky, cortizol-ridden, stressful state that’s really hard on you physically.

So we know for example that if you’re in a state where you’re chronically exposed to threat or punishment, which is the case in depression, say, you produce a lot of cortizol, which is a stress hormone, and cortizol is toxic. So the more of it you produce, the more you kill off your hippocampus cells, and you really need them because they’re a key to memory.

You do in your immunological system-- there’s all sorts of negative side effects of cortizol poisoning - increase incidents of cardiovascular disease, heightened rate of cancer. Plus, it’s just no fun, right? It’s the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, essentially. If something unknown happens to you and blows your frame of reference, right – knocks you for a loop, sends you to the underworld, however you want to construe it – that’s really going to upset your bandwagon and throw you into a state that you’d do virtually anything to avoid.

But by the same token, there is a possibility that inside that chaotic nest, there’s something you really need. And what’s the logic there? Well, the logic is something like this: When you look at the world, you only see a fragment of it.

And that’s good because it’s pretty overwhelming, and a fragment’s generally more than enough. But all the information that you’ve ever gathered in your entire life – to build yourself out of, and to make your life stable – has come as a consequence of your ability to explore what you don’t understand. And that’s an unlimited capacity, right?

No matter how much you explore and how much information you gather, there’s always the possibility that there’s way more information out there. And that means, if you have a problem and you see that it’s a problem, even though that’s frightening, it’s also a gateway into a domain of possibility; and the possibility is this richly informative background that could, in principle, provide you with any answer you need.

And then you can think one more thing. And the old gods, Mars say, the god of war. Venus, the god of love. They're all internalized for us, right? We know that anger's a psychological state. Love is a psychological state. But if we look at our great religious traditions, Christianity say, or Buddhism, just to take two as an example.

We still have this notion that what these figures represent is something external. Well you might say how primitive, right? Just as primitive as the idea that the god of war is something external is the idea that this sort of figure is supposed to be something external. It's supposed to be something embodied, right? It’s a story about the nature of individual moral responsibility.

So the idea is something like this, well reality itself, the existence of things seems to depend on the existence of a finite observer. So that we can see things from a perspective. If you don't see things from a perspective, everything is the same. There’s nothing delineated. But if there's gonna be delineated things, small things, insufficient things, and they're gonna be aware, they're gonna be vulnerable as a part of their limitation.

And so you say well, limitation is a precondition for being. And that means suffering is part and parcel of being. Dostoevsky said clearly, look, I give you all the cake you want. You got a big house. You got nothing to do but watch TV, right? And propagate the species. Are you happy? And Dostoevsky says well no. Why?

Well cause human beings are really fundamentally, you know, ungrateful and insane. So if you give them some little comfortable niche to occupy themselves with so they don't have anything to worry about, the first thing they're gonna do just like Adam and Eve basically or just like Buddha, they're gonna run around looking for the apple, looking for the snake, looking for the trouble to smash the frame into bits no matter how comfortable it is just so they can get access to a little chaos and have some fun.

And so then you think well maybe it's more like the purpose of life isn't to avoid chaos because we like chaos. It’s entertaining, right? It keeps us alert and awake. And it gives us something to do that really has no end. And so maybe the answer is something more like well forget the frame of reference. And forget the chaos but hit the balance right between the two, right?

So that you got one foot where it's reasonably comfortable. And you got one foot out there where it's kind of exciting and dangerous. And that's perfect. And then you think the state you wanna attain that makes you resistant to even the greatest anomalies, anomalies of death say or vulnerability or mortality is exactly that, that position, right?

Balanced right between the forces of chaos and the forces of order or between, between yin and yang. And how do you know you're there? Cause that's what it really boils down to. How do you know that you're there? And then you think okay, it's pretty simple. You watch with your eyes open, just like Solzhenitsyn watched.

You think, I don't know everything. So let's see what I do know. No preconceptions. I'm not gonna shield myself from the truth with some second rate frame of reference. We don't believe in those anyways cause they're always fragmentable. I'm just gonna watch. So when am I not miserable?

And then you think well, I'm not miserable when I'm interested in thing, something, I get interested in something. I don't exactly know why I get interested in it. It catches me. And what are the, what's the phenomenology of being caught? I’m not self-conscious when I'm engaged in something. I'm more like a child, which is why children have intonations of immortality.

I'm engaged in this process. I don't think about myself, so I’m not self-conscious. I lose my sense of temporality because it seems like I can do whatever it is that I'm doing, thing that I enjoy for hours. And the time flies by. And I'm not even really aware of the surrounding world. And none of my existential concerns are paramount at that time.

Every need is suppressed by my engagement in the activity. And then you say to yourself well, yeah, that only happens like you know, ten minutes every three days or something when I'm being particularly miserable. But you might say well the fact that it happens at all is probably worth paying attention to.

I mean if you believe that your experience is real, like real, the fact that you can get into a state like that at all is worth paying attention to. And so then you might say well that's, that's where your sense of ethics really starts to arise. What makes you interested?

Well it might be just as cracked and, and, and peculiar as something you could possibly imagine, right? Your parents are against it. Your friends are against it. Even you’re against it when you’re thinking clearly. But there's still this reality that something compels you. And then you think well can you trust it?

And I think well that's a tough question because I read a long time, for a long time I read accounts of serial killers. Cause I was really interested in what motivated them, right? And they’re an interesting breed in many ways, which is why there's such a popular fascination with them. And you think geez, maybe you can't trust your interest, right?

Maybe it'll take you somewhere you don't wanna go, like seriously where you don't wanna go. How do you know that if you really let yourself be who you could be, that you'd end up somewhere good? And so then you come to the second part of the story, which is something like this; let's say that you’re a very, very, very finely tuned biological machine, right? Akin to a computer.

And then you say okay, you take a computer and you feed it false information. What do you get out? False information, right? Well you’re stuck with this computer. It's very complicated. You kind of reside in it in some manner you don't understand. And yet, you’re prone on occasions either to deny the information altogether when you walk away from something you know you shouldn’t walk from.

Or to feed it bad information. And so then what if it, what if this was the case? What if it was the case that the systems that orient you with regards to your interest can become pathologized by any relationship you have with yourself that's predicated on bad faith?

And so then you think well, that's why there's an ethical aspect to this redemptive process. Like a real strenuous and strict ethical aspect that goes something like this; There are things that you can do, find yourself engaged with the world at such a level that your existential concerns could disappear.

And we can even understand that biochemically to some degree because if you're really interested in something you got a dopamine release an exploratory dopamine release. That’s great. I mean that's associated with positive affect, with confidence, with increased immunological functioning, with better memory functioning. With learning.

Everything you want. It's also potently anxiolytic and analgesic, which means that if you're really pursuing something that's compelling to you, you're much more resistant biochemically to punishment, disappointment, depression, pain, threat, etcetera. And it's not cause you're blind. It's not cause you're blind.

It's cause your nervous system is optimally tuned to make you maximally resistant. And so then you might think if you were optimally tuned, how resistant would you be? You don't know, right? Cause it's in a spiral that never stops moving uphill. We don't know what the upper end is.

And we have exemplars that might indicate what that upper end could be. But we don't actually know. So then you think okay, well here's the here's the rule, say, something like this. If you look at the world from this perspective, which is something you have to decide if you're, you know, you find compelling and reasonable, the rule is this; you're always gonna run into anomaly, right?

And anomaly’s always gonna look, look to you like, like this. And it's no bloody wonder you wanna run away from that. I mean in some ways your whole body's telling you watch out, and for good reason because it's no joke. But then there's more to the story because the anomalous thing, that's everything you don’t know.

You might say well, you're going out with someone and you wanna have a long term relationship. They betray you. How could there be any good in that? That's certainly what you're gonna ask when you first encounter the unexpected information. But then you might think could be that I'm a little too naive for my own good.

Right? People pull me in a little more than they should or I'm not sufficiently careful when I enter into a relationship with people. Or I don't treat people right. Or I don't have a good conceptualization of myself. Or I'm chasing after the wrong person. Well that's all gonna be very annoying to learn.

But if you don't learn it you're gonna be in big trouble. So maybe the best thing to do when an anomaly of that sort hits you is to think okay, yeah, it's a dragon. No doubt it will eat me. But if I don't let it eat me then there'll just be another one waiting around the corner and it'll probably be a little bit bigger.

And if I get eaten by enough of them, I'm not really gonna wanna be around much. And maybe I'm not gonna be willing to help other people be around much either. Doesn’t seem like a very good alternative to me. So back in 1957, some new Gnostic writings were discovered in a, in a cave.

They were discovered by these two Arab guys who went out to kill the man who killed their father. They took him out into this cave and they killed him. And when they were burying him they found these amphora full of papers and papyrus. And they took them home.

And their mother used a bunch of them to light cooking fires with. And one day one of their friends who was an antiquities dealer showed up. And he said you know you shouldn't be burning those. Those are about fifteen hundred years old. And they look like very early Gnostic gospels.

And the Gnostics were this branch of Christianity that was pretty violently suppressed by the emergence of Orthodox Christianity. And the Gnostics believed that faith was a good thing but knowledge was all right too. And they wrote gospel accounts say of Christ's life that were knowledge predicated as much as revelation predicated say.

And this is one of the quotes from one of those gospels, the gospel of Thomas, which is actually one that, the only one that got out. Carl Jung got a hold of them, interestingly enough. And this is one of the quotes. And I really like this. This is a non-canonical saying of Christ. And the saying is: “if you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

And I think that's a pretty good line to close off the class. So thank you for attending. (clapping) (End)