2015 Maps of Meaning Lecture 1: Introduction (Part 2)

So you'll undoubtedly have noticed that this is being taped, so the tapes will show up on some relatively regular schedule. I wouldn't expect that precisely because I don't want to make any promises about, you know, exactly how quickly that'll be done. Martin Jang here is doing it on his own accord, so it's like, you know, two thumbs up for Martin as far as I'm concerned. He's done this for a number of my courses, and it's a lot of work, and it's much appreciated.

So anyways, that's why all of this stuff is set up. I think I told you pretty much about what the class entails on your part, you know, and if you've heard this lecture—I'm sure at least a reasonable number of you have heard me lecture before—so you sort of know how I'm going to lecture. That was more or less how I'm going to do it. I'm hoping that we can make this class, like, deadly successful; that's the idea. That you'll regard it as something that, depending on your participation obviously, you'll regard it as something that's really valuable.

I'm telling you, the stuff I've learned that I'm telling you about has been so useful to me that I can't buy—I can't—I can't really even communicate how useful it's been. It's been unbelievably useful. And, you know, partly what I'm going to explain to you, if I can, is why. You know, there are tenets of classical morality, and there's a variety of them. One of them is, for example, don't lie.

And you know, that's a tough one because you might think, “Well, you know, why not?” Really, why not? I mean if you can—if you can set up a situation so that you benefit from an untruth, what stops you from doing it, you know? Dostoevsky, in one of his most famous statements, he said, "If there's no God, everything is permitted," and it's a take-off on Nietzschean thinking too. It's a problem that he thought would be the fundamental problem of the 20th century, and I think he was absolutely right.

It's a question very much worth thinking about. It's like, why bother with things that are moral? Why do things right? Is there even such a thing as doing things right? These are great questions. Hopefully, what I'm going to try to do with you guys is to show you what the consequences are. I've been thinking about those things for, you know, it's almost 30 years I guess now, and I've got a ways—certainly a ways—that has been satisfying to me.

I want to tell you what I've concluded, and then you can decide for yourself if you think it's useful. One thing I would really like to encourage you to do is, like, you should be skeptical about what I'm telling you. Really, like, you should question it. I don't mean the kind of skepticism that's like this, because, like, you know, I'm not here to prove myself to you at all, and you're not here to prove yourself to me either. So you have to listen; you have to attend, but by the same token, I would say, like, I'm telling you things that I've tried to hammer to death.

I've tried to see if they were wrong, you know, because that's how you're supposed to test ideas. You throw out an idea and you hammer the hell out of it—see if it's wrong, not whether it's right, because that's ideological thinking. The things I'm telling you are things I could not disprove; they seem to stand up. I've tried multiple tests, you know.

So one of them is sort of a Concilium test, and the concilium says—a word that was defined by Edward O. Wilson. When an explanation is concilium, what that means is that it's coherent across multiple levels of analysis, you know? I've tried to test the ideas that I'm describing to you. I've tried to determine whether they're logically coherent and appropriate at the level of general psychology, clinical psychology, neuroscience, narrative theory, and religious thinking. Then also to see if they're actually applicable as practical realities in day-to-day life and in social life, and as far as I'm concerned, they stand up. That's been my experience.

I've also watched people over many years now try to apply them in their own lives, and all I've been able to see so far with my graduate students and so on is that they work. So you know, we're going to try to understand some basic issues like what the utility of truth is, and that's a really important question. It's maybe the fundamental question: is truth useful, and if so, how and why?

We're going to go after that, especially with regards to verbal truth because there's something magical about words. There really is something magical about them, and the way you use words determines the course of your life, and maybe more than that, maybe the course of everyone's life. So I want to explain to you how that can be true and what it means.

That should be relatively entertaining. Hopefully, what else I can tell you is I'm going to throw out some key propositions—there's probably about seven or eight of them—and what I'm hoping is that you'll be able to use those propositions as keys that will help you unlock things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to consciously understand. I gave you some examples of that with this little story, you know, because that little story happens to be an extraordinarily deep little story.

It's, you know, it's so old, that story. Like, I think that story stems from when we were still in trees, really, and when our prime enemies were snakes. It does appear, according to Lynn Isbell anyways, who's an anthropologist in California, that our primary predators 60 million years ago, when we were basically inhabiting trees, were predatory snakes. So the human being versus snake motif is not only the oldest story we know from a consciously articulated perspective, but it might be the literal story of our species as a biological entity.

So, you know that, and I'm telling you that because it gives you some idea about how deep these stories can go. They can go right to the bottom of things, and if you know some of these key propositions, when you see archetypal stories portrayed in front of you—and that happens all the time, like with all the superhero movies that have come out lately—they're tremendously expensive to make, hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's like they're all predicated in archetypal themes, you know? I think it's of great interest to know the most expensive artifacts that human beings produce, or at least among the most expensive artifacts that we produce, are CGI movies that are computer-generated to tell archetypal stories, you know? That’s also the technological process that, in large part, is driving computer innovation because the most demand that's being placed on things like computer chips is actually, you know, recreating reality—CGI reality—because it's the most complicated thing to do.

It's like, what the hell? Why are we doing that? What's up with that? Why would you spend 300 million dollars making Iron Man? You know there’s a profit motive there, obviously, but everybody will go see it. It's like, what's up with you people? You'll see some dingbat in a metal suit fly around in the air; you know that's not true. It's like, what are you doing at those movies?

You think, “Well, I'm entertaining myself.” It's like, yeah, yeah, right, except why is it entertaining? And why is it entertaining to all of you? And why is it entertaining to everyone, you know? There's a reason for that. So partly what we're going to find out too is what it is about stories that attract our interest and why it is, why that is, and it's not—it's not merely entertainment; it's like the most potent form of learning that we have.

So, well, anyway, that's the goal. During this as well, you know, I hope that you can articulate yourselves further and also come to some deeper understanding about the absolute essential nature of proper language use in spoken language and in written language because you basically think and speak and write yourself into existence.

One of the things that means is you should be very, very careful with what you say because you are literally bringing realms of reality into being through speaking, and you want to make bloody sure that the realms of reality that you're participating in and bringing into being are the ones that you would actually like yourself and those you love to inhabit.

I don't have much more to say about the course than that, so what I'll do now is see if you have any questions. So yes, right, well, yeah, you know, okay so the question is why is the dragon portrayed as bad? It's like, well, first of all, we might notice that culture cross-culturally, that's not necessarily the case, right? So the dragon in the West tends to be something to conquer, and something that hoards virgins, strangely enough, and it’s something to be conquered and the treasure to be taken.

But in the East, particularly among the Chinese, the dragon is something that's positive, and what I would say is when we'll study this, when we get into the symbolism that's associated with reptiles, fundamentally, with predatory reptiles, we'll see that the dragon is actually a tremendously ambivalent representation because it represents—the dragon really represents the unknown. Or even more precisely, it represents the element of the unknown that you don't even know exists.

Sometimes something unexpected could happen to you, but you can understand it when it happens; but sometimes something unexpected happens to you, and it's so unexpected that you can't even conceptualize it. I would say when the Twin Towers fell in New York, that was an event like that—it's really beyond your understanding.

There’s an ambivalence about that because you don't know the nature of the event precisely, so that the predatory reptile, especially the treasure-garden predatory reptile, stands for the potential that exists in the unknown, and that potential can be positive and negative, right? Because it's the source of all new things, but it's also the source of that which will destroy you, and so it's a very paradoxical entity.

Now one more thing—the story implies that there's an optimal size of dragon, and I would say while your nervous systems are actually tuned to detect the optimal size of dragons. We'll talk about this in great detail as we go through the biology of anxiety and disgust. As it turns out, which is something I've learned more about recently, you know how you can sometimes, if you're engaged in a task, let’s say a cognitive task, you can find it overwhelming—it's writing something or have a very difficult time understanding; maybe you even wonder if you're up to it.

Okay, so you might say, “Well, your nervous system is indicating to you that that's a threat.” And then other times, you'll be dealing, say, with a cognitive task that's beneath your abilities, and so it's easy and you get bored. So then you'll be dealing with a cognitive task that—it’s like Goldilocks and the three bears, right? The temperature is just right.

What happens is that you have to grapple with the task, and it pushes you forward in your development, but it also really engages you. So you're tied right into it; it’s really easy to remember and understand. You make progress, and it's difficult and energy demanding, but you’re completely captivated by the process. That's the right size dragon, and that's what your nervous system is telling you.

It's saying, “Look, this amount of novel information in this domain is precisely the amount that you can incorporate well, optimally transforming the knowledge structures that you already have without exceeding your capacity.” What that does—the way your nervous system signals that to you—is you get interested in it. You know, and because you might ask yourself, like, why do you get interested in things and you're bored by some things and some things are overwhelming? It’s like you don't have any choice about that; it's not a decision you make.

It's something you discover as you act in the world. So dragons of optimal size are engaging, and they push your development. But if they get too big, then they're too much potential. I see an analogy between the story with the baby in the crab's claws of thunder hitting everywhere. It could be, like, the thing about that particular symbol is that it describes the unknown outside of the conceptualization—it's pure potential.

Now, you know, here’s something to think about in relationship to that: I did a little TED talk on potential, which, if you're interested in this sort of thing, you might want to look at. I got it right in that talk, I thought. There are different ways of thinking about what the world's made out of. We think that it's made out of matter—that's the basic dogma, say, of the materialist realm.

I would say, look, it's really useful to treat the world as if it's made out of matter and look at all the things that treating it in that way has allowed us to do. But that doesn't mean it's the final statement about the nature of reality. Whatever matter is, it's pretty damn strange when you get to the bottom of it; we don't understand it at all, and we don't understand its relationship to consciousness.

But putting that aside, we also act as if things other than matter are real. For example, we act as if potential is real, and that's a very strange thing, you know, because potential by its very nature is not really defined. Because otherwise, it would be potential, right? It would be actuality.

But you know, all of you understand your parents when they say, “Well, you know, you should live up to your potential,” or “There's potential there.” I would say actually most of the time when we're dealing with the world, what we're dealing with is not the material world per se. What we're dealing with is potential; it's like what this could be, and we're trying to realize the potential.

Another thing that you could think about—with regards to the symbol of the dragon in particular—is that it's a representation of potential. I think the reason that it takes reptilian form— and we're going to talk about this in great detail—is I think that what happened as we evolved is that the systems that we originally evolved to detect predators underwent a cognitive revolution that transformed the world into abstract representations around us.

That initial predatory detection system was elaborated into the system that we use to detect the unknown as such. Because, you know, in evolution, the fundamental elements that evolved over the course of evolution remained intact. We're using the same systems, and that system has a language. So the language is something like, well, the unexpected event is sort of like the snake in the grass, which is perfectly reasonable. You can think about it as a metaphor; I think it's deeper than a metaphor, but you can think about it as a metaphor.

I would say, well, we have optimal-sized adversaries, and I don't think you can live without an optimal-sized adversary, which is also an interesting—it’s a very interesting idea, because, you know, one of the things that people always ask—this is a very metaphysical discussion—is, you know, why there has to be evil and horror in the world? It's like, well, it's not clear to me that the world could be constituted in the manner that it's constituted in any acceptable way if there were no adversaries.

It's like, well, maybe the snake in the garden is necessary, you know? Maybe that imperfection, that adversary, is necessary. It's the thing that spurs on development. What would there be without an adversary? Maybe nothing, you know? Because you like to have—I can give you an example; it's a funny example.

There's this little animal whose name I cannot remember, unfortunately, but it lives in the ocean, and in its larval stage, it has a brain. It swims around; it's a little tiny thing; it swims around, you know, like the little plankton and so on. At some point during its development, it fastens itself onto a rock, and it grows into something that sort of looks like a plant, you know, but it’s stable; it never moves again.

So as it develops into this stable rock-clinging entity, it basically digests its own brain, and then it doesn't need one after that. The reason it doesn't need one is, well, there isn't really anything for it to do; it just sits there, filters water—it takes like a sponge, sort of. It takes the nutrients of the water in; the brain is just like it's extra energy-using tissue, and so it doesn't need the brain anymore.

So, you know, it's like you don’t need to think if you haven’t got an adversary. So then you think, well, are there optimal-sized adversaries? Part of the little motif of that story is if you pay careful attention to things as they change, maybe you can keep the damn adversaries optimized. I think that actually, it may not be true, but it’s possible that it’s true.

That’s something you know—that’s something if you really pay because the question might be—and this is something that I thought about when I was developing—all these are there’s a little kind of—looks like, okay, well there’s obviously some things about existence that aren’t exactly the way you might lay them out if you had the choice, you know, like the fact that people are fundamentally vulnerable and that you’re imperfect in 50 different ways and that life is full of suffering, and everybody dies, and you know all these things that are existential nightmares—it's like okay, fine; it's easy to judge that as unacceptable, and maybe even worse than unacceptable, intolerable, even deserving of obliteration—you can even go that far, and people do go that far.

But there’s another question that, that question begs, which is, yeah maybe, but maybe if you brought all of your resources to bear on the problem without holding back—all of them—then that would be okay. Then you could master it, and that’s possible, you know? The thing is you’ll never know unless you try it. That's the thing, because it’s actually a claim that requires an existential proof.

You can’t listen to someone tell you that, and even if it’s true for them, that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be true for you. The only way you can test a proposition like that is existential—you have to act it out. But as I mentioned earlier, I see very, very few truly optimistic ideas in profound thought. Most profound ideas are pretty damn pessimistic, but this is one I think that's an exception to that, which is it is possible that you're constituted so you have enough resources to deal with reality as it actually lays itself out.

One of the ways—and people have been thinking about this for a very long time too—is that the most effective—one of the most effective weapons you have in that engagement is the capacity to pay attention. Paying attention—and it’s another thing I’ve learned over the years and that’s been extraordinarily useful to me—we kind of conflate rational thinking with attention and sort of make attention like the ugly stepsister of rationality in some sense because we never really consider it as a separate entity because we are basically rationalists, and we believe that we can deal with the world in rational ways.

I don’t think that’s really true because I think the world has, at its core, it's existentially irrational. There’s too much of the observed, an arbitrary. But it is perfectly reasonable to draw a clear distinction between paying attention and thinking, and you know Western culture has elevated thinking in some sense to the position of the highest deity, but I think we’ve got that wrong. I think attention is much more powerful than thinking and that thinking should be the handmaid of attention, because if you pay attention, you can pay attention to the things you don’t know, and you can become incredibly powerful if you pay attention to the things you don’t know because you keep learning and learning and learning and learning.

You know, there was a New Testament injunction that goes along the lines of, you know, it's necessary to love your enemy. I actually think that's an existential hint, you know? If you listen to people conversatio logically minded, you have a socialist on one side and a conservative on the other; all they do is trade platitudes. There’s no discussion, and the goal of the discussion is to humiliate the other person and to prove that your a priori stance is correct and that that person is incapable of conceptualizing the world properly.

It’s like one of the most interesting things about running into people who think differently than you, if you pay attention instead of thinking, is they will tell you the weirdest bloody things, you know? The things you never possibly have thought of. It doesn’t mean that you have to bow down and agree with them immediately, but what the hell difference does it make if they don’t think the same way you do?

Maybe though, maybe out of ten statements, they'll offer you one that you wouldn’t have conceptualized, and that’s the difference between paying attention and thinking. People love to be paid attention to, you know? It’s the currency; human currency is attention, and attention is an unbelievably powerful tool.

You know, one of the things we’ll find out is that the ancient Egyptians actually conceptualized attention as a god, and the god they conceptualized attention as was Horus. And you all know, of course, because you've all seen representations of course, the famous Egyptian eye, a single eye—that's a representation of Horus. The Egyptians figured out, like the Mesopotamians have before them, that the highest human deity—which is like the most powerful set of human attributes—is to be associated not only with language use (the Mesopotamians really nailed that) but even more importantly with the capacity to pay attention and watch.

It’s a sort of suspension of judgment; it’s like you don’t have to be right or wrong in the situation; all you have to do is pay attention and listen and watch, and then potentially a solution will emerge out of that. Look how our brain is—the visual cortex, approximately, you know? Paying attention—we're incredible visual animals. Paying attention really matters. It's harnessing that visual attention in particular, but that's the harnessing of our most fundamental cognitive capacities.

So anyways, you know if you pay attention to things, you can see what interests you, and that’s also an empirical search in some sense, which is quite interesting. This is part of why I got interested in psychodynamic ideas; it’s like there are things that rule the way that you govern yourself that you have no control over. You can only discover them, and one of them is what interests you. So you can't really force it.

If you're not interested in some things, like, well, good luck trying to make yourself interested. Sometimes you can do it to some degree, but more particularly, what seems to happen is that your interest highlights things for you, and then you follow that around like you're following a search beam or something like that. To me, that indicates the action of very, very deep underlying psycho-biological systems that, in some sense, are directing your consciousness, you know?

If you pay attention to that process, you can also learn a tremendous amount from that, like what you're actually like. What are you interested in? Where is your being trying to manifest itself? That’s another way of thinking about it. So those are all things that we're going to try to figure out because I would also say that if you're capable of allowing your true being to manifest itself, so that would be your potential, that's also the best source you have of the kind of weaponry that you need to defend yourself against the inequalities, tragedies, and horrors of life.

You can reveal yourself, in a sense, by pursuing what's illuminated for you, and I can't tell you whether or not that's true, but it's a powerful idea, and it's a very old idea. I think there’s plenty of evidence that at least it is—you could say it’s plausible. Yes, it’s plausible; it’s more than that; it’s—but plausible will do because I can't think of a better word.

Into model fits, it’s a hypothesis that has enough potential that it went—you worth testing, and I would like you to test that sort of thing. Like one of the things that I really encourage students in this class to do—and you can start doing this right away—is to pay attention to what you hear yourself say; just watch. Pull yourself into—detach yourself from your ideas and thoughts, and watch what you say. At the same time that you watch what you say, watch how you feel when you say what you say.

What I'd like you to try to detect is—you'll notice if you start noticing that some of the things that you say make you feel strong and together and united, and other things that you say make you feel disunited and weak. And then I would say quit saying the ones that make you feel disunited and weak because they're false.

What you’re picking up by the loss of strength associated with that utterance is the fact that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark with regards to that use of language. It’s manipulative; you’re trying to appear smarter than you are, you’re trying to prove a point, you’re trying to avoid something. There’s some game you’re playing that’s other than merely stating what you see to be true at that moment.

That’s a different way to live, you know? Because you can calculate, and you can plan, and planning is useful; I have nothing against that. But you could manipulate reality so that it manifests what you want; or you can decide that what you’re going to do is pay attention and call things as you see them and see what happens if you do that.

They’re like—that’s a real risk, right? Because you don’t know where that’s going to take you, so that’s an act of faith in the character-guardian sense. It’s like if you have faith in the truth, what that means is that you will say the truth, and that’s a hard thing to do. You know, it doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want whenever you want regardless of the effect on other people or that you can use the truth as a baseball bat, which you can certainly do.

It requires a tremendous amount of sophistication, but, you know, one thing you might think about is, well, if you are attempting to make yourself a mouthpiece of the truth, you have reality on your side. Then you might say, well, could you possibly have anything more powerful on your side—reality? It might not be a reality you want or the thing that you wish for, but you might think, well, you know, if you called things as you saw them and you were very careful about that, maybe that would lead you through life properly.

It's a very different way of thinking, and it is tied with this idea that there's something fundamental about the truth. So I would say to start this, if you want, just pay attention to what you say, you know, and would like you to detach from it. So don’t identify too much with what you’re saying because that's another thing that people do—they identify with what they think.

It’s like, what makes you think that you're thinking? One of the things you said, which I really loved, that blew me just—it just flattened me when I first read it. He said, “People do not have ideas; ideas have people.” I listen to ideologues talk all the time; it’s not them talking. It’s some dead spirit of the past that’s voicing its opinion through them.

You can tell when you're talking to someone like that because you can predict everything they're going to say. So in what sense is that them talking? It isn't them talking at all; it’s a collective—it’s a collective voice that has appropriated them and convinced them that it’s actually part of them. It’s like no, that's a devil. That’s what that is.

So just watch. You can try this experiment all on your own. Try it for a month—detach yourself from what you say and think and notice when you say something if it makes you feel more grounded and powerful, or weaker, and stop saying things that make you weak.

So, you know, that's sort of like existential test number one. So, well, it must be just about 4:03, so then I'll see you all next Wednesday. Take a look at the website, and I will say start those exercises or check them out.