Transcript
-
I can't remember who made this point, but I like the idea that consciousness is the cosmos.
-
Yes. Or at any rate is part of it. How can we know? We
-
Can't know, but there's two ideas related to that. One is that potentially the entire cosmos is like a big idea.
-
Yes.
-
And then the second point, which leads on, which I find brilliant, is that the cosmos is like one big joke. The constant relationship we have with the cosmos is that of a joke. And that we're laughing together, not at one another.
-
But I think that to call it a joke is to diminish it. What I'd rather say is that it's a celebration. In other words, it's something that simply joys in its own existence, in the multifarious, quite unnecessary, super abundant overflowing of things coming into being.
-
And there is certainly a joy to the multifarious nature of existence, but there are some who would hear that and say, "Well, it doesn't look like much of a joy to me because of X, Y, and Z." And common point would be, well, look at the Holocaust. There's not much magnificence to that.
-
Well, you're now raising the problem of evil and how could there be evil in a world that was-
-
Which I think is an important point.
-
It is an important-
-
Because again, it talks about these tensions.
-
Well, I mean, one of the ways to think about it is that you simply cannot have a attentionless anything. And if there is to be this, as I believe, not micro controlled or engineered predicted unfolding of something that's already there. So Bergson gives the idea of, I mean, this is from 1905 or something. So the thought that came to his mind was that of a fan unfolding. When you unfold a fan, there's a painting on it, but it was always there and really all that happens is it's just unfolded. But he didn't see the evolution of the cosmos in that way. He saw it as indeed I see it and as indeed Whitehead saw it as the coming into being of things that are actually new all the time. This means that there can't be a sort of omniscient, omnipotent God, like an engineer who worked everything out in advance and set the machine going and then pushed off to watch the nine o'clock news.
[02:33]
That is not what I understand the cosmos to be. That of course does not mean that there could not be a divinity or a sacredness to the cosmos because there is.
-
Well, the one limitation of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence is that there is no limitation.
-
Yes.
-
A response to that is that, well, if there's no limitation, there's no change and there's therefore no story, and yet we clearly experience story day in, day out with the existence of life. Therefore, is it possible for God to be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, because it would mean that there's no story. I think you've just demonstrated my point. Which follows that God then ... God is flowing as much as we are flowing.
-
Exactly. And as my direct heart, the 14th century German mystic said, he's a source of, I think, great wisdom that God needs us as much as we need God. I think that's a very important perception that God, and I don't know what or who or whatever God is, but I don't believe that the idea of such an entity or such a ground of being, not an entity really, can be dismissed. I don't, for a moment, want to argue against the possibility of the being at divinity, but that divinity is not properly captured and the word is a good one by the left hemisphere's typical wish to pigeonhole things as like this, like that and like the other. Let's look at omniscience. The idea of omniscience is that God knows in advance. Now, my suggestion is that that is a typical left hemisphere problem. Well, does he know in advance or does he not?
[04:46]
Or does he know in advance or does he not? But it doesn't have to be like that in that there can be ... Oh God, I'm going to stop this here. I'm not doing this very well. It suddenly reminds me of- Let me just have a bit of a think for
-
Second. No, no, it just really reminds me. There's a great line in Dostoevsky,
-
Which
-
I recall often in moments like this, where he goes- This
-
Is in the Brothers Karamazov probably.
-
No, it's in Notes from the Underground. Oh, okay. As far as I remember, I've got to be honest, I didn't read it in the book. I saw it somewhere. Probably one of the good reads, Quake quotes, which is actually one of the advantages of the internet. But yeah, it goes, speaking nonsense is the soul privilege that mankind has over other species. It's through speaking nonsense that we get closer to the truth.
-
Well, that's very good. Perhaps that comes back to your joke, I don't know. Yeah,
-
Maybe. I don't know.
-
I don't know. Let me just see if I can find ... Sorry. I'll find a place where I've said this more succinctly. So can I start again on that one? Yeah, yeah, please do. Yes. Yes. I think things turn on what the word no means. And we think that when people conceive God as omniscient, they're using the concept the knowing of facts about how things will unfold. But I would say the kind of knowledge that God has, and in this sense, there are no limits to it, is the knowledge of the acquaintance. So the word cannon or the word connect. So when one talks about God's omniscience, one is really talking about God's knowing the thing that is coming into being as it's coming into being, and that the reason it is coming into being is through God's knowing it, if you like. So that is a different ... Where the right hemisphere is understanding of what to know means, to have a deep acquaintance and relationship with something through which both it and the Noah are enriched.
[07:09]
And omnipoters again is usually thought of in the left hemisphere terms as the ability to interfere and manipulate with the situation. So to put your finger into the scales and alter things. And I don't think that's the kind of power that God could or should have. That's a left hemisphere conception. The power God has is to permit things to be what they are. If God was constantly controlling, limiting and directing things, then that would undermine the whole purpose, it seems to be, of a free cosmos that is evolving into things that are yet to be known by ourselves and by God, but will be known and are in essence in principle known by God, even though the details are the point of the unfolding of the cosmos. Purpose is a little like this in that people much too narrowly imagine what purpose means. For example, if you say there can't be a purpose to life or to the world.
[08:23]
And in one sense, I'm wholly in agreement. There can't be a left hemisphere purpose, which is it was created for this utilitarian outcome in the way that I create a machine to achieve a certain end. So it doesn't have that purpose.
-
And that would be the line, all artists quite useless
-
Would
-
Be critiquing that
-
Kind
-
Of purpose.
-
Precisely. Whereas it does have a purpose overall, which is a purpose that only comes into being and comes to be known through the thing fulfilling its potential. So it has a potential. It's not an inert blob of randomness. Everything has in it potential and the unfolding of that potential, that is the purpose. You can think of purposes at two levels. For example, you can say that the purpose of living is to further life. Now, people would say, "Well, that doesn't make any sense because that's just a circle." But that's to think of it in terms of a linear mechanism that is going to achieve an end, but the purpose of life may be the business of life, experiencing life. And equally, you can purpose, for example, to have children, you may have a strong purpose to have children, have no children, but you can't possibly purpose it in a mechanical way.
[09:50]
So I have a purpose to have children. That means the following steps, I do this and I do that, and surely I'll have children. Your purpose will be fulfilled in all sorts of ways that are undetermined and can't be determined, but the fact that you have that purpose makes it much more likely that that outcome will come about. Does that make sense?
-
Well, I mean, whether I've understood exactly what you mean is one thing, but I certainly took a lot from it. And I really like the idea that to say that, and it's to say that life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
-
Completely.
-
Which is an absolutely magical line, is not to say that there's no purpose.
-
No.
-
It's just to say that it's not a purpose that can be written down.
-
Can I just gloss that for a moment?
-
Yeah, please
-
Do. Yeah. I mean, there's a wonderful saying that life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced, because nowadays we tend to think of everything as a problem to be solved. In fact, on a just a trivial and amusing level, practically everything, every enterprise these days is called something solutions. It's predicated that life is a series of problems that need to be solved, but it isn't. And this way of thinking dominates. So for example, biology is a lot of problems to be solved. Medicine is a lot of problems to be solved. That is a very limited way of thinking about it. There are, of course, there will be problems to be solved. In life, we can't avoid having to solve problems, but it isn't simply a matter of a succession of problems that get solved. And one of the problems with the way we think about evolution, including the evolution of animal species, but certainly the evolution of human society and civilization is that they arise out of the solving of problems in a sequential manner that, as it were, human beings living 30,000 years ago had to face certain problems and solve them in certain ways.
[12:02]
Everything is set up in this linear way. But in fact, that is a very skewed way of thinking about how things emerge in life. They're not set up as problems and then solve. All kinds of things emerge concurrently. And to ask which one was the one that started the process and led to the next is wrong. For example, for a certain kind of limb to be evolved, which may be a very useful thing, all kinds of changes need to take place in bone, in muscle, in skin, in nerves, in blood vessels, and so on. And in the being as a whole, and no one change on its own is any good. They've all got to happen. And that doesn't mean to say that they're all therefore designed or predestined. It means we have to think differently about how holes emerge.
-
Emergence being a key theme there. It is. But not to say that we don't have some action ourselves to influence the emergence.
-
We will play parts in it, and as the process evolves, we will respond to it. But one of the difficulties ... A lot of difficulties people have with evolution, which of course is a very important and powerful idea that must have a very great deal of truth to it, to say the least, is that we think of it as a succession of things replacing one another, whereas it's not. It's nothing on its own evolves, except very minimally. The whole process evolves. It's a stream that changes, and in the stream, you can't say that this little molecule of water causes that molecule of water to move there and so on. The stream itself governs, as it were, the flow of the thing. And the parts that you then afterwards say, "Oh, well, this caused that. " That is a retrospection on reality, and retrospecting on it always changes it.
-
And the stream is good because there's both a pull and a push.
-
Precisely. And we only think in terms of push from behind, we never think in terms of pull from in front, that things are attracted as much as they are propelled toward a certain end.
-
And Nietzsche talks about that attraction from afar, drawing people towards particular potentials and potentials being ... Is potentials fair? So the potential is plural of potentials, because for me, this idea of ... I like to say destinies rather than destiny. I
-
Would agree, hold
-
On. Because I like to feel that there are these different ... Paths is not even the correct phrase, although it helps us to understand the issue, but there are lots of possibilities. But when a possibility has occurred, then when one looks back, it does feel as if it is the destiny. And in fact, it is because once it's happened, it's the only one that could have happened. But that's not to say that looking forward, there are not still other possibilities.
-
And it's not to say that there aren't patterns as well in what emerges from say the water falling in a fairly random way on a landscape will begin to follow certain paths. You can't predict exactly which paths, but it will inevitably emerge into the sea at a certain limited number of places. It wasn't, as it were, destined to that. It wasn't propelled to that. It's that the potential of the landscape has realized in its interaction with the water to form a stream that flows into the sea.
-
And one of the big challenges, and I really want to get back to this, people focus too much on solving problems and
-
Chat
-
A little bit about the chapel Peter Thiel, who feels that the ultimate problem to be solved is death. So let's get onto that because he's of a similar fame to the other chapter I mentioned, Elon Musk. They're both American entrepreneurs. But before we go there, I want to speak a little bit about this, continue to talk about potential and destiny and fate because it's fascinating and important. And it's how the question is, how does one choose, or at least how does one try to choose one's path?
-
How you make your decisions is an entirely personal thing. And I don't think, obviously, you're expecting me to make a prescription because that's impossible. But again, it's about ... We come back to this idea of what is true. What is true is that which in general responds best and describes most of what it is that you experience. Now, it may be true that all you experience is just entirely meaningless. I can't imagine how terrible that would be, but also it's very hard to help somebody whose vision is that just everything is meaningless and pointless. It's called depression, and it is a hard one. And at times I've experienced it, but I don't think that it's a reality at all. It is a pathological state in which one has ruled out all sorts of things that have meaning, not because we cheer ourselves up by painting a kind of sense of purpose onto life.
[17:45]
What seems real when one experiences, it is the purpose when one is in the right disposition to experience it, to acknowledge it, and truly to feel it. And at other times, you're bound not to.
[18:05]
We come back to this idea that humans with a very limited way of thinking would like to clean life up. They'd like to get rid of all the things they don't like and have only the things that they do like. If they did, then they would really achieve finally a state which did seem entirely pointless. There's a lovely essay on this in a way, which is the final chapter of Julian Barnes's history of the world in 10 and a half chapters. And it imagines, as you begin to realize when you read it, that he is in a heaven where anything he wants can happen. The point that emerges is that as one of the nurses in this world that tells him when delivering whatever it is he wants, most people find that after a couple of hundred years, they prefer to go back to a world that has limitations.
-
And this brings us nicely round to background, I should say, to the death problem, which isn't a problem because ... And I want to take a moment to mention a chap called Eric Dodson, who you're very unlikely to have heard of, but whom I owe a debt of gratitude to. He's a niche, niche YouTuber, who's also a professor in philosophy. And I'm not sure where he doesn't ... He just says," I am a professor in philosophy somewhere in America. I've got no idea where. "I wanted to mention him because he also brought to my attention that quote," The kickod one of life's not a problem to be solved, but reality experienced. "On death, he makes the point that, and it's similar to this idea of a heaven where everything happens to you. He goes," If you didn't have death approaching, if you weren't being towards death, as Hardiga would say, then there would be no reason to do something now because you could do it at any point, which I think is really, really powerful.
[20:05]
And it relates to this idea that you need the resistance in order to have the action.
-
It's a very good one. And we all know that if we live somewhere near something that is very special and we think, "I must go there." If it's always possible for you to go there, a decade or a lifetime can go by without you ever actually going there. So a degree of sense of containment is very important, but I think a very simple point was made by Mary Midley, who I think at the time was 92, about approaching death. And she made the very simple point that life wouldn't be better if it went on forever, which is really what we're saying, that to me, the idea that life simply went on and on and had no ending, literally could never, ever stop, brings a kind of terror, like the idea of almost anything going on forever.
[21:07]
And it would also very much rob the meaning of sacrifices that we make, resistances that we meet, which are the things out of which the meaning and value of our lives emerge. Now, if we had no terminus to life, it would rob it of value. And once you've agreed that there is a proper limit to life, then it's simply a matter of where? Should it be 30 years? Should it be 80 years? Should it be 500 years, 4,000 years? It really ... I mean, of course, in reality, it can't be most of those, but the point I'm making is that once one agrees, then the rest follows. And death should be thought of as a natural part of life. In what I consider one of the most important prayers, a very well known one, the cantical of the sun by St. Francis. It's simply a prayer of gratitude, saying, "Praise it be God for the various things that you think.
[22:21]
" Towards the end, it says, "And praise be thee for sister bodily death." And for a lot of people, that's a very strange remark. I had an elderly friend who just puzzled over that and couldn't understand it, but I think as death gets nearer, I see more and more of what that means. I think some people approach death in a spirit of resistance all the way. Maybe that helps them, and I'm sure it works for some people. It does mean though that you're on a hiding to nothing because you can't put this off for very long. And it means that most of your life is dominated by this fear. To spend all your life worrying about the fact that it's going to end is to stop experiencing as it's happening. One of the things that I became very aware of in helping people with anxiety and depression is that a very small part of their experience can dominate the rest because it's not the way they want it.
[23:27]
And instead of appreciating that 97% of the way they are and the way things are for them is working well and could be enjoyed. They spend an enormous amount of their time inhabiting this dark closet that takes up 3% of their mental space, where it's not perfect.
-
Yeah, this is the plague of perfectionism.
-
It is.
-
And I like to tell the story of trying to iron a shirt. When a shirt is a mess, the smallest little crease means absolutely nothing. But when you've got it to almost perfection, suddenly that tiny thing becomes everything.
-
Very good.
-
And it can be dangerous, but at the same time, one needs to have an ideal to strive towards, whilst appreciating that it can never be achieved. And there's a nice story in fact of ... And I mean, whether ... I don't even know where I got this story from, but I tell it, of the Egyptians with the pyramids. And what they would do, they'd always leave one stone out of place, and they'd go, "Perfection is the realm of
-
God."That's very good. And in fact, I know that it's part of Chinese tradition as well, that you always leave one, or even two, tiles missing from the roof, because to be perfect would be to challenge the fate, really, too. People who are keen for perfection will do themselves harm. If you are a perfectionist, you ruin pleasure in everything you do. One of the hardest types of people to treat are ballerinas because they strive very hard for a certain kind of beauty and perfection, and we should all be grateful to them because without the suffering they go through in doing that, we couldn't enjoy the transcendent beauty that they're able to bring into our lives, but they're very hard people on the whole to help because whatever they achieve, it's not yet enough. And so they may be the best dancer in their company, but there's a dance company somewhere else that's even better.
[25:37]
And so they're never satisfied with being somebody who's achieved something so spectacularly beautiful and wonderful that most people would give anything to be able to do it. I