Lecture: Biblical Series VI: The Psychology of the Flood

So I'm going to launch right into it. I like this story as well. This is the story of Noah and the flood and then the tower of Babel, which I think are juxtaposed very interestingly. The tower of Babel is one of those stories, like Cain and Abel, that's only a few lines long. It's like a fragment in some sense, although the story of Noah is quite a well-developed narrative.

Um... but like the other stories that we've covered, it is relevant at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. And so what I'm going to do to begin with is to start with some background information, so some psychological background information. So that the story makes sense.

And the first thing that I'd like to make a case for is that you bring to bear on the world an a-priori perceptual structure, and that's really an embodied structure. And it's a consequence of the three and a half billion years that you've spent putting your body together, which is a tremendous amount of time. And not only your body, but your mind, of course, because your mind is part of your body and very much embedded within it.

You know, you tend to think that you have your brain in your head and it's sort of floating separate from the rest of your body, but it's not really true. You're a tremendous massive system of neurons running through your entire body. Autonomic small neurons in the autonomic nervous system then are on the central nervous system. So that's a lot of neurons, and then your central nervous system, of course, enables you to exercise voluntary control over your musculature and also to receive information from it.

Your brain is really distributed through your body. One of the things you may not know is that people who are paraplegic can walk; if you suspend them above a treadmill, their legs will walk by themselves with no voluntary control. So your spine is capable of quite complex activity; in fact, when you walk, mostly it's a controlled fall, and mostly your spine is doing it.

So anyways, the point of all that is that you don't have a blank slate consciousness that's interpreting a world that manifests itself as segregated objects in some straightforward sense. You have a built-in interpretive system that's extraordinarily deeply embedded and invisible, because you might think about it as the implicit structure of your unconscious.

It's what gives rise to your conscious experience, and it presents you with the world. That's one way of thinking about it, and it's a good way of thinking about it—the psychoanalytic way of thinking about it, as well as the neuroscientific way of thinking about it. Because one of the things that's pretty interesting about modern neuroscientists, especially the top-rate ones (and those are usually the ones that are working on emotions, as far as I've been able to tell), are often quite enamored of the psychoanalyst Jacques Panksepp, was a good example of that.

Because they came to understand that the psychoanalyst's insistence on underlying unconscious, personified motivations was actually an accurate reflection of how the brain worked. So to think of yourself as a loose collection of autonomous spirits governed by some overarching identity is a reasonable way of thinking about it.

The question is—or a question arises from that—is what is the nature of this a priori structure that you use to interpret the world? And I think the clearest answer to that is that it's a story. And you live inside the story, and that's very, very interesting to me because I believe I have a couple of videos that lay this out.

I believe that Darwinian presuppositions are at least as fundamental as Newtonian presuppositions. I actually think they're more fundamental, and that the fact that we've evolved story-like structures through which to interpret the world indicates to me that there's something deeply true about story-like structure. They're true at least insofar as the fact that we've developed them means that here we are living, and that it's taken three and a half billion years to develop them. They're highly func...