Episode 265: Kekulé (Oh Yeah!)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it. Look, wait a minute! I'm... How you doing? Why are you... A good man. Good.

[00:00:50] They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a... Very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:18] Dave, Presidential hopeful RFK Jr. suggested that the COVID-19 virus may have been targeted to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews. Are you mad that he beat you to that theory? I mean... No, he didn't suggest it. He was just saying some people have suggested it.

[00:01:40] Also, like, in his defense, because I know he's a threat to your kind of ruling class business as usual politics. Yes, the Kennedys always are.

[00:01:50] I think he was trying to say that, you know, it did seem to affect certain ethnic groups less than others and then kind of spun it into some weird theory. But what do you think of the theory? Why would...

[00:02:06] Whose agenda is it to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews? Like just those two. I mean, I don't think that it did. Right? Like China was harder hit than probably any other country. Right, I'm just saying... It seems, in the face of it, absurd.

[00:02:21] I'm saying put yourself in the head of the person who buys this theory. Like what is this organization that wants to disproportionately kill everybody except Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews? There's not some huge alliance that I'm aware of. I mean, I would... I'll just tell you then. Yeah.

[00:02:40] There was previously the elders of Zion and Chinese scientists working in concert to try to eliminate the blacks and the Mexicans. And the Jews basically had to make a deal with the devil.

[00:02:52] You know, they're like, well, we don't like the China people, but we need them for our science. So let's do it. It's like Winston Churchill making a deal with Stalin to fight Hitler. Yeah. No, but it is interesting.

[00:03:06] You know, this is an interesting lesson in taking what probably is true. Right? That it was... Well, it just is true that COVID disproportionately affected...

[00:03:16] I'm not saying people of color because I think there are plenty of people of color that don't count in that group of people who was adversely affected. But the obvious answer to that is, well, health is just worse than a lot of people because of socioeconomic status.

[00:03:30] And that just happens to overlap a lot. Or there are certain pre-existing conditions that say black Americans are more likely to have. But he goes straight to like, well, I mean, genetically engineered viruses to target certain ethnicities. It's like the lack of parsimony.

[00:03:43] This just occurred to me and now maybe I might be on board. And this is not going to be anti-Semitic like Dave's thing. But what's the one thing that all Jewish guys love? Their mother. Okay. But after their mother. Asian girls. Right? Well...

[00:04:10] So if it's a world where it's just like Jewish guys and Chinese people, they're going to be... The Jewish wives were coming into the lab and going, what are you doing? Exactly. Nothing. I just sounded like George Costanza's mom. I don't know what I said.

[00:04:29] Makes sense. Makes sense. The food also, I guess, is an obvious overlap. No, there's some legs to this. I can see this. But this is not going to be a topic that we use for our Patreon listener selected episode because nobody suggested it.

[00:04:48] It's because... Well, it's obviously because it's clearly a topic that you should use for your Overton Windows podcast. This is where you shuffle. At first I thought it was crazy. And now I'm like right in the middle of reasonable discourse. Right now it's just about which ethnicities.

[00:05:07] Yeah. This is why I like that you have a new podcast miniseries, because I get to shuffle off all of your controversial political opinions too. It's like I'm outsourcing it to Robert Wright. Right. You can talk about this on that thing.

[00:05:25] We are going to talk about a topic that is voted on by our beloved Patreon supporters. And all of our Patreon supporters have given us well over 100 suggested topics and we've had to narrow them down to some finalists.

[00:05:44] Neither of us have talked at all actually about which ones we want to pick. So this segment is we narrowed down to five or six finalists that are $5 and up supporters can vote on.

[00:05:57] And so here's the thing. So yeah, like you said, 140 comments, not all of those obviously suggestions, but well over 100 suggestions. More I think than we've ever gotten. We usually have like, I don't know, at least two or three overlapping. Yeah, two or three.

[00:06:15] And this time I'm actually a little worried that we're not going to have any overlap. So over or under? If it's over under two and a half, I would go under. But if it's over under one and a half, I would go over.

[00:06:27] Assuming that we can each bring like seven to the table. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. With seven, I'll go. I'm still going to go under. Under two and a half? Sorry, under one and a half you're going to go. Under one and a half. Yeah. You'll go over.

[00:06:42] But now you can just not choose any of them. Yeah, we didn't put anybody. No, it turns out you go first. Nope, wasn't on mine. We should say what our main segment is about because we already stole an idea from our listeners.

[00:06:56] Ah yeah, we did. The Cuckoo-la. How do you pronounce it? I don't know. All I know is that the E is for sure pronounced Cuckoo-la. Yeah, the Cuckoo-la problem. Cormac McCarthy month continues on Very Bad Wizards as we delve into his one piece of non-fiction writing.

[00:07:15] It's amazing. It is. It's incredible. He's a different breed. And we haven't talked about that either, but he knocked it out of the park, I think. Yeah, totally. But first, we got to figure this out. So you want to go first?

[00:07:33] Sure. I'll start with my top candidate for overlap, like if I had to guess, and it would be Farid Anbari's suggestion. He suggested actually a couple of different chapters from William James's A Pluralistic Universe.

[00:07:51] And the one that I picked, which I didn't write down anything other than it was chapter six. Yeah, I did write a little more down. This is overlap. I'm so glad. Like I'm surprised. Like you knew this would be on mine, right?

[00:08:05] I strongly recommend lecture six in which he presents Henri Bergson's view on the limits of concepts and thus logic and rationality for revealing truths about the nature of reality. Kind of perhaps connected to what we'll be discussing in the second segment.

[00:08:24] Yeah, this sounds great. Like everything he said about it and he wrote a lot about it sounds right up my alley. And I'm glad that it was. Yeah, and thank you Farid for actually writing. He wrote like a pretty in-depth description of each of these.

[00:08:38] All right, I'll go. Okay, this is my candidate for one that you probably won't pick, but it was the most popular. Like if you just go by hearts, by far of any of the...

[00:08:53] Jeff Lord suggested both of you take a healthy dose of magic mushrooms, five milligrams maybe and hit record. Anytime. I would absolutely do that. I would fly to Ithaca and do it.

[00:09:11] This is such a, what do you call it when you pander to the audience? This is like he knows that this is going to get votes. He knows it's going to get your vote. Yeah, you can't put this on the finalists unless you're willing to do it.

[00:09:28] We have another way of doing something like this that we could maybe look into as well. Let's just say it's been percolating. It's been percolating. I think I've definitely made a little headway.

[00:09:41] I would love to do an episode where we just take some Vicodin, so if listeners have any to send in to us. And we'll just be like, that was cool. Remember when we were in Vancouver, that was pretty cool.

[00:09:55] That was awesome. Okay. My next one is, I'm getting to the point where enough people have said this enough times that I think I'm just going to watch it anyway.

[00:10:08] But it is to do an episode on the anime TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion, as I believe it's pronounced.

[00:10:16] I've never really looked into it. I don't know that you would be down for an anime, but let me just tell you one of the things that I was reading about it that was maybe up your alley.

[00:10:30] And it was about the themes, and this is just from the Wikipedia. It just has a lot of mystical themes apparently.

[00:10:36] So, like Kabbalah and so it says, series has been described as a deconstruction of the Mecca genre and it features archetypal imagery derived from Shinto cosmology as well as Jewish and Christian mystical traditions including Midrashic tales and Kabbalah.

[00:10:50] The psychoanalytic accounts of human behavior put forward by Freud and Jung are also prominently featured. Okay. This sounds good. Have you seen it? You haven't seen it? No, I haven't. My daughter has seen it. I'll look into that. Yeah. So, it's always a commitment to watch a whole.

[00:11:04] How long is it? Apparently there's one season on Netflix. That's in the running. Wander Mute suggested something from Stanislaw Lem and Solaris is... That's exactly what I had that I avoided doing because I knew there was a big chance of overlap, but I've already lost.

[00:11:22] Yeah, you already lost. We always have a little overlap. So, I think I would love to do the novel Solaris and then we could also incorporate Tarkovsky's movie if we wanted to or not.

[00:11:32] Yeah. I remember a little bit ago after we did... What were we doing that we were talking about? Solaris? But I read Solaris and watched Solaris. Oh, you read it? You've already read it?

[00:11:47] Yeah, I've already read it. And not that long ago, of course, I would reread it. But the differences between the two are super interesting, between the takes on...

[00:11:55] I would just do a mega, both of them. We can talk about them in conversation with each other. That'd be very cool. Yeah. Cool. I don't know if that's been on before. It might have been, but... It might have been.

[00:12:11] Maybe now if we add, we'll watch and read.

[00:12:14] Okay. So, let's see. Maybe there's more overlap than we thought. There are a couple of essays or short stories that people suggested that I just hadn't heard of. So, I just did a little bit of digging into them. And this one is from Federico Alvarez, Walter Benjamin's essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

[00:12:32] No way. I am so surprised at this. No, I had it in my, I want to mention it, but I didn't think there would be any chance that... Yeah, it looks interesting.

[00:12:43] Yeah. That's like a Marxist... Like I know of it more than I know it. So, I looked into it today. I think we should put it in our bank. Yeah.

[00:12:54] If not on this list. I think both of us are interested in a lot of the things that is, you know, he's digging into there. Yeah, exactly. It's just a question. Can we understand what the fuck he's talking about?

[00:13:06] Okay. This is one I don't think you'll have, but Bruce All One suggested this fiction podcast called Within the Wires, which is something that I actually have already listened to.

[00:13:24] The last time when I went camping with my daughter, we always have a podcast, like this kind of podcast series that's fiction that we listen to. Some of them are really good.

[00:13:33] This one was very cool. We only listened to, I think, the first three seasons, but each season is its own story. It's interconnected, but like we could just do season one, which I thought was kind of brilliant.

[00:13:46] And, you know, unfortunately it's very much one you wouldn't want to spoil because there's all sorts of reveals about the world and about the particular narrative.

[00:13:55] But the way it's told as Bruce All One talks about is really cool. The first season is just these ostensibly anyway, they're just meditation tapes that somebody is supposed to play in this room and you like every all the details get filled in, but it always stays with that format that it's these cassette tapes.

[00:14:19] So are they acted? Like are they told like a story?

[00:14:21] It's just told because this one, actually I think maybe all of them, they're all narrated by one person. Because in this case, it is just this woman's cassette tapes to, you know, sometimes there's other sound effects and you might hear other voices, but it's just this woman. She's great. She is awesome.

[00:14:43] So I don't know, you might, this could be one that we put in the bank for another time, but it is, I was so impressed with like and kind of inspired by it. I was like, this is like a new kind of art form that I feel like I want to know more about.

[00:15:00] Yeah, it is intriguing. Like I, it is weird that we don't have more of that. Like a radio guy, it's like a radio drama, but like a modern take on a radio drama.

[00:15:12] Radio play, I think is the like exactly what this is in the tradition of. But yeah, it does. It takes it a different place because it can, you know?

[00:15:22] Yeah, right. Cool. All right. So I have a suggestion by Jim, just Jim. A short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa called Kappa. A 1927 novella about a psychiatric patient who travels to the land of a kappa. Kappa are like mythical creatures in Japanese mythology.

[00:15:49] And yeah, it's supposed to be like a maybe satire of the time, the particular era of Japanese culture. But yeah, I take it not on your list.

[00:16:01] Not on my list. Cool. I didn't have that. I don't think I looked into it. So The Stranger, Zach Lacey, Kim Wu, The Stranger. He also suggested Synecdoche, New York, which I think would might be fun to do. We could have Jesse Graham on. He's the number one fan of that movie.

[00:16:23] You saying the name of that movie reminds me of the last time we talked about it where you were insistent that I was the one pronouncing it wrong. I don't think so. But maybe. Sounds like something I would do. The Stranger is my actual.

[00:16:37] It's funny. I didn't even like, I must, my eyes must have glossed over it because I remember him talking about Synecdoche and Kafka on the Shore. And I just skipped right over The Stranger. Yeah, I think The Stranger just belongs on our list.

[00:16:50] If people want us to do it, like we should just do it.

[00:16:53] Yeah, sure. TL recommended just a topic, the concepts of sacredness and holiness in the modern Western world. And just him saying that made me realize like I am interested in the notion of what is sacred and what. Have you ever read the book or heard of the book The Sacred and Profane by Marcia Elliott?

[00:17:13] I've heard of it, but I don't know anything about it.

[00:17:16] So there is this interesting literature on what is sacred and what, like what role the sacred plays in culture. And I thought that's a fun topic that I would actually like it as an excuse to dive into some of the work on it, psychology and.

[00:17:29] If there's like a specific text and that would work then or that would work. Yeah, that would be, I would like to do that. I mean, we could also just decide to do that. Doesn't have to go on the list, but I think it could.

[00:17:42] All right. I have one that I've been wanting to do for a long time, even though I don't think I've pressed it to you. Ben Linder, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Nikki just read this book. Really? Did she like it?

[00:17:58] Yeah, she liked it. She read it, I think, because a lot of readers of Piranesi recommended it as a book that was similar. I haven't read it. I've read like three other things by Calvino and I've loved all of them. And I think that would be really fun.

[00:18:15] Who recommended it? Ben Linder. Oh yeah, it's right here. Yeah. Yeah, I would put that on the list actually.

[00:18:25] All right. The last thing that I have is actually, I don't even know why I put it on the list, but Ian Boese suggested a movie called Captain Fantastic. And I think he says, not sure if it's artsy enough for Tamler, but he really liked it.

[00:18:37] And I just looked it up and I think I just wanted to watch it. I don't know if it would make an episode, but on the off chance that you had it, I figured I would say it.

[00:18:45] I don't have it. I do have something in my alternates for me and Boese, which is Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. But I don't know anything about that movie.

[00:18:55] Yeah, I just happened to look it up and it looks kind of interesting. Well, because Steve Zahn, aka Tamler, according to my daughter. I'll take it. Franklin Jell-O. He's in the new Gemstones. Oh, sweet.

[00:19:13] Any alternates? Like just let me run just a few things by you that people said that I was definitely intrigued by. Blood Meridian. You're probably done with it.

[00:19:27] No, I haven't. I haven't been able to listen to it in a couple days. So yeah, I actually thought, well, we're both reading it. So I think we'll just do that.

[00:19:37] We'll probably just do that. Yeah. The Wilford Sellers Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. That's where he talks about the manifest and scientific image. Kind of a classic philosophy paper. It's been a while for me, but it is if we go back to like the classic series.

[00:19:55] Desi suggested Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. It's a book, but it's pretty short. I'd never heard of it.

[00:20:04] It seems pretty interesting. And then I really liked the idea of a Shakespeare play, you know, like Hamlet or Macbeth or something like that. It might need to be. We need a little time because we'll probably have to watch something and read it. But all right.

[00:20:18] All right. So what do we have? OK. Farid, we both had Farid. We both had Solaris movie film. And did we have... Did you? Oh yeah. Solaris and then Chapter from William James. Invisible Cities, you said you might want to put on the list. The Stranger.

[00:20:43] That anime series sounds interesting. It's like depending on how long it is. Yeah, actually don't know. That's a good question. Maybe I'll look that up in our break. OK, so where are we? We have William James, Chapter 6. We have Invisible Cities. We have... Solaris.

[00:21:05] Solaris. Did you want to put The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? Yeah. I mean, I wish I knew a little bit more about it. But yeah, like, it's weird that you're trying to get the Marxist text on. No, I just...

[00:21:21] Yeah, I would definitely though. Because... I feel like if we put Neon Genesis on there, it's just gonna win. You think? Really? You know, I don't know. It's not our Reddit.

[00:21:37] That's true. Well, I mean, I would be willing to risk putting it on if you were. So there... Let's see. How many episodes are we talking about? There's like 20. There's like... Yeah. That might be a little tough to get to.

[00:21:53] I think I'll just watch it and then if it's like so awesome... Then I'll... It sounds like I'll like it. So... Oh, The Stranger was another one. The Mushrooms we agreed on.

[00:22:05] I'm not gonna put The Mushrooms on there. But Stranger I feel like works since we're gonna... I mean, I feel like we're gonna do it anyway. Anyway? Should we give them a chance to pick something else?

[00:22:19] Yeah, like maybe Invisible Cities works better as the choice there. You know? Do you think Within the Wires would actually be a good episode? Like I'd be willing to give it a shot. I do. Yeah. I do.

[00:22:33] Let's do that. Okay. Within the Wires, Solaris, Invisible Cities. So I feel like we're gonna do Blood Meridian.

[00:22:38] I feel like we're gonna do The Stranger. But we could put one on the list just... It would definitely push up the schedule of us doing one of those if we want. Right. Let's do Blood Meridian. If people want to continue the Summer of Quartermacrofage.

[00:22:56] Summer of Quartermacrofage. Alright. We got our list. Pluralistic Universe, Chapter 6, Solaris, Movie and Book. Let's specify that. Movie and Book, Invisible Cities, Within the Wires, and Blood Meridian. Cool. That's a good list. That's an interesting list. I like it.

[00:23:12] Well thanks everybody. I'm sure we're gonna do probably ten of these at least at some point. I feel like we have an obligatory apology to make to the denial of deaf people. Yeah, that's true.

[00:23:26] I mean at one point I think I should just reread that and see what I think. We need to be psychoanalyzed for why we keep putting that off. I don't think I do. I think I don't even need the unconscious. That should be our last episode.

[00:23:44] It should. Hopefully one of us doesn't die all of a sudden. That'll make it hard to deny death at that point. The acceptance of death. Alright, my dogs are going crazy so let's take a break and we'll come back to talk about Cormac McCarthy. The Cucullae Problem.

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[00:30:16] if it weren't for listeners like you who reach out and keep us going. Thank you. And now back to the episode. All right, let's get to our main segment. So like Tamler said, we're on a McCarthy kick.

[00:30:28] And one of our listeners suggested this essay, his only nonfiction work, Kekule's Problem. So apparently this was written during his time at the Santa Fe Institute. I didn't know this at all that McCarthy spent like on and off 20 years at this nonprofit research institute.

[00:30:47] And it sounds like he was just a junkie of, I don't know, science, just science in general. And he wrote this in 2017, published it in Nautilus. And I guess that's it. That's the only thing he's ever done on the nonfiction side of things.

[00:31:04] Yeah. And so, okay, I'll give it just a quick overview of the article. Obviously we'll put a link. I think it's short enough that everybody should read it. There's no excuse. It's really nice to read too. And it's really good to read. Yeah.

[00:31:17] The title Kekule's Problem comes from the chemist Kekule, who was famously known for discovering the structure of the benzene molecule by having a dream in which he saw a snake eating its own tail and woke up and was like, oh, that's the structure of the benzene ring.

[00:31:34] And McCarthy really wants to talk about two of the biggest ideas I think you can in psychology. One is what is the unconscious and what is it doing? Like what work does the unconscious do? And two, what is language? How did it emerge?

[00:31:49] And what is its relation to the unconscious? And I think central to this essay is why is it the case that the unconscious mind doesn't seem to communicate in language? So the way he puts it is, why couldn't his unconscious mind

[00:32:05] upon pondering the problem of the benzene molecule just say, just present to him the solution. It's a bloody ring. Like it's a ring. Instead of giving him some weird imagery of a snake eating its own tail. I think that summarizes the gist of it.

[00:32:19] Yeah, and the answer to that question is that the unconscious has been around much longer than language and it's not used to communicating through language. It doesn't like language really and it doesn't trust language. In part, McCarthy suggests just because it's such a newcomer on the scene.

[00:32:43] The way he describes it, it's like some uppity part of the brain. It's like the first nouveau smart. Exactly. I love that aspect of it. There's this deep respect for the ancient roots of the unconscious and less respect for the newcomer.

[00:33:07] Yeah, and the little that I have read of Cormac McCarthy, like his fiction, you can just see how his writing in Blood Meridian is just suffused with imagery that feels primal. But then of course he's a slave to language, right?

[00:33:30] He's a wordsmith so he has to find a way to communicate those ideas, that imagery into words. Yeah, one of the things that I wanted to ask you actually is like is this kind of view, is it going to resonate with writers?

[00:33:45] Because writers are constantly trying to come up with a way of describing something and they can think about it forever and then all of a sudden it appears to them and there's like, oh, that's it. And then they put it down but I think his idea is

[00:34:01] it doesn't appear in language. Language is a way of then expressing the kind of epiphany that you already had. The actual process of thinking in any discipline is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up at some point

[00:34:19] at which one has arrived, a mile post, so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems, I wish you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.

[00:34:29] It seems like something, this idea of language not solving the problem, language just being the post-hoc way of articulating how you've solved it is I think maybe something that would be attractive to a writer. Yeah, yeah, totally. And like an interpreter of the thought too, right?

[00:34:50] Like it's actively trying to interpret the feelings, the images that the unconscious is providing in a way that can be communicated. It's interesting, you know, it's not a non-controversial opinion. There are people who do, I kind of am one of these people

[00:35:07] that do just by that of course the thinking that we do isn't in language. You know, we can have an inner voice that tells us something but when we're thinking dog, we don't think the word dog necessarily, we just think of a dog.

[00:35:20] And so Fodor called this mental ease. Pinker talks about this as the language of thought. And so all of the thinking that's going on in the unconscious, I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking we were thinking in a propositional way about a problem linguistically

[00:35:37] because that's the only way we can tell somebody what we were thinking. But probably we don't and it's just the stuff that we need to generate words to communicate, not to think. And what's interesting is how this can even be true of certain language-based problems

[00:35:55] which is kind of what he's talking about, right? So we were talking off air about playing that spelling bee which is completely about language. The whole point of that game is to utilize language in a skillful way and yet it sometimes feels like the unconscious

[00:36:11] is the thing that's solving that problem. The thought isn't in language because it just kind of appears in your head. The problem is that we're not thinking about the problem-solving nature of the unconscious. It just really, I don't need a study to tell me this,

[00:36:27] but stepping aside from a problem when you've been thinking about it so much is I think does wonders for you. And I think that sometimes the language or at least the explicit thought, whether it's language or not, I don't know,

[00:36:43] but the explicit, effortful trying to solve a problem just gets in the way. It seems to be getting in the way. So the fact that your mind is doing something and you're not actively attending to the thing is kind of crazy. It's not just that the unconscious,

[00:36:59] like this is a particularly interesting view of what the unconscious mind is doing. It's not just like you have in our notes, like is this a Freudian view of the unconscious? I guess, but Freud thinks of it as much dumber than this. Freud thinks that the unconscious mind

[00:37:12] is just desire fulfillment, right? Like it's just there to try to push you toward the things that animals need and then your ego, your largely conscious mind is filtering all that stuff. But McCarthy is saying, no, like I think that even your unconscious mind can do mathematics.

[00:37:33] Like I think it's actively problem solving in a much smarter way than I think Freud would characterize it. Yeah, so like a lot of his examples are things where you need language to even understand the problem in the first place.

[00:37:46] And the only way the problem can be solved is through language. And yet it's that little, that middle thing, like how you get from this language-based problem to the language-based solution that is I think where the unconscious does its work. And then it's this question of,

[00:38:04] well, how do we gauge that? How do you judge to what extent? I mean, it's certainly not like this that you solve most problems by just kind of, all right, let me put all the facts I know in order

[00:38:16] and then I'm going to go through them one by one and see what they entail. That's not how we solve most problems. It's something that just kind of appears. Like we somehow get it and we have no idea how that happened.

[00:38:28] I guess if the controversy then is over the stuff that happened right before then, even though it's not like something that can be explicitly laid out as a chain of reasoning, is language still somehow implicated? Yeah, I don't know.

[00:38:42] Like it seems like if a problem has to get to me somehow by being communicated to me, then it has to be the case that language is involved, right? You can't give me your mental ease, your thoughts without language. You have to put them into language.

[00:38:56] You communicate to me, but it does feel like maybe we're translating it online. When we talk about split brain patients, I think we talked about this, right? But language is lateralized heavily. So it's on one side of the brain and it's split brain patients.

[00:39:12] You can show that they're perceiving something on one side of the brain that's non-linguistic. But it does seem like what's going on is it needs, in order to communicate, it has to kind of send stuff over to language and then like output it,

[00:39:26] like input and output, you know? McCarthy just admits that this is something that, like it's not even clear how we could get an answer. So he says, it might even solve math without using numbers. The truth is that there is a process here

[00:39:40] to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness. And almost by definition, right? By definition, right. Yeah. So, okay. Do you want to talk more about the unconscious or do you want to move to language?

[00:39:57] I want to know where exactly is this debate to the extent that you know about it? This idea of thought mostly proceeding without language and language, like how accepted is that view? Yeah, I don't know. It's super hard to know like the intersection of the unconscious

[00:40:19] and language and the stuff of thought. There are hardcore language people who think that all of the thinking that is advanced that makes us like characteristically human is sort of because of language, like the emergence of language unlocked that. And there's probably some truth to that.

[00:40:36] But then there are some people who think, look, we symbolically represent things with no need for language. And I think that McCarthy is coming at this like every other animal on Earth doesn't have language. And clearly they are doing things that require thought and problem solving

[00:40:52] and they're representing things. That they can't speak doesn't mean that they can't think. That would be a mistake. So, we're this kind of weird quirk where we have all of that stuff, all of the mechanisms to process information about the world around us without words.

[00:41:09] And then all of a sudden, like 150,000 years ago, all of a sudden language pops up, emerges seemingly out of nowhere in human beings. And now we have like two systems that seem to be working in concert. But obviously the unconscious mind doesn't need language for thinking to occur.

[00:41:27] So, what is going on with our reliance on language? So, there's that question. There's a completely other set of, I guess, findings, discussion in psychology about problem solving in the unconscious that I think brings to bear on this, which is a lot of work showing

[00:41:45] that your mind is somehow engaged. Just like what we were saying with the word games, the spelling bee. Your mind is engaged in problem solving. And sometimes people at least claim to show experimentally that if you distract somebody from the problem when they come back to it,

[00:42:03] they actually make better judgments, better decisions, they solve these problems. And so, there's a whole bunch of studies probably the kind of studies you would hate. Because I'll give you an example of one kind of judgment. So, suppose that you are trying to decide what car to buy.

[00:42:21] So, I give you the information about the cars, like a list of cars and their characteristics. In one condition, people are told like, okay, think hard about all of these attributes. Do that thing that you said no one ever really does. But weigh the pros and cons

[00:42:38] of each of these attributes. So, people are given the information and they're distracted. They're told to like work on something completely different. And then at the end of whatever amount of time is given, both of those people make decisions. And then somehow people rate

[00:42:54] the quality of those decisions. Like there is like a whole bunch of different methods where you could say like how satisfied were you in the long term? Or you could say like how objectively good is it or how much does it agree with other people?

[00:43:06] And different problems will have different ways of determining what's good or bad. But the bottom line at least is that when people are distracted, oftentimes they actually make better judgments. And therefore the brain is doing some important work behind the scenes. I think I might have problems

[00:43:22] with the study design or the measurement tools or all of that. But I totally buy that conclusion that when you put a lot of research, read every review, learn all about the specs versus just sometimes you're, you just kind of know which thing you want to buy.

[00:43:40] And you're going to be happier if you do the latter, never mind all the bandwidth that you save by not expending that kind of conscious energy. Like I totally buy that. I buy it too. I mean particularly when like some of them are seem to me to be

[00:43:58] so obviously the case we're thinking about them would wreak havoc on your decision making process. Like if you were to give me two aesthetic like things. I'm going to hang up in my room. And you either like I either just sort of made the decision without thinking explicitly

[00:44:16] about the attributes of them or I like explicitly was like the colors and the contrast and whatever that I think of course I'd be happier with my gut judgment because my gut is the thing that's looking every day at the painting. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:44:33] And that's the thing that we don't realize because we identify with language based thought and that's who we think of as us. But like there's clearly this other part of us that is very well connected to how happy we feel how annoyed we are

[00:44:48] that that part too needs to be happy. In fact it's probably much more important that that part is happy with your choice. I don't know if this is related to the McCarthy thing or not but I think like I am happiest

[00:45:04] when I either have my gut tell me or I'm like one person like anytime I have a tech I have a tech question about what iPhone to buy. I just text you. You're like yeah I get that one. Perfect. That's all I need.

[00:45:18] You know going to a restaurant and you just want the waiter to be like take that one. You know that's all you need. So I do think there's this other there's just a lot of noise that our language based thought does that we just don't want.

[00:45:32] It's like we're not built for that. We're not built to like stress so like we just want to be told either by our own unconscious or by somebody else just not us deliberating. We want to be told what to do. Yeah I think you're totally

[00:45:48] right and I think we really do. I don't know especially us as like academics. So much of what we think has to be converted to language to communicate it like some so much of the work that we're doing is like to prepare for a

[00:46:04] lecture or write a paper or do a podcast that it's it is hard to to separate all of that. I think a lot of you know clarifying the things that you're thinking with language is important for the sake of communicating your thoughts to other people.

[00:46:19] But we probably way overemphasize it when it comes to making decisions for ourselves. But I think even when you're talking about preparing a lecture that's actually the example I was searching for but didn't find until you mentioned it. That is often even though again you are presented with

[00:46:35] a language based thing that you have to interpret and then you have to in language describe it to other people give your kind of interpretation. So much of any lecture that I do is just like OK I got it. Like I figured out like it's how McCarthy describes

[00:46:53] coming up with the idea for this essay. Like he just he went to bed and then he woke up and he just knew it. He knew what to do. That is how it works. So it just comes up like I figure it out. Because you need like an

[00:47:05] angle and then the angle just comes. Yeah. No totally. The phenomenology as you describe it is very true. There's a lot of work that does go into the language that I'm using. That's true. But when you're struggling with like how to organize something so that students

[00:47:23] will understand the story that you're trying to tell or the point you're trying to make it just sometimes I don't know how to describe it falls into. Yeah. It falls into like almost like an outline but it's not a real outline because then you have to

[00:47:36] do the work of explicitly outlining it. But you know you just know this is how it all fits together. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But that reminds me there. So there's other work where people and creativity and they call it incubation in creativity where people are

[00:47:54] given like a problem to solve and then they they some people are given the opportunity to sleep on it. Some people actually report having dreams that has this have the solution to it. This other aspect of the essay that we haven't really talked about his dismissal

[00:48:11] of the view that language is an evolutionary adaptation that it has been selected for. He denies that I guess he takes the Chomsky side of this debate and devotes a good chunk of the essay talking about why I I had a couple of questions.

[00:48:34] First of all where's the status of that debate because I know Paul and Steven Pinker you put in a BBS paper that they did on this very question. So first of all what's the where is that debate at right now. But then second why

[00:48:48] I'm a little unclear how this is relevant to the larger argument that McCarthy's making. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure why it's important that he that he make this argument. I think that what he's trying to say the reason that it's important is if

[00:49:07] it's the case that language just all of a sudden emerged then it makes sense that it's not it's not something that evolved slowly alongside the rest of the mind. Right. It it didn't have that time to integrate itself. I think I think that's what what

[00:49:26] he would say. I think that's why he's hammering trying to hammer this this point home. OK. So if it's if language is a million years old which I don't think many people think it is but if it was then yeah like our brain and language would kind of

[00:49:40] co-evolve. But if language was a hundred thousand years old and it was a spandrel versus whether a spandrel is like something that is a byproduct of some other like evolutionarily adaptive system whether it's a spandrel or whether it you know was adaptive. Does that matter to

[00:50:03] what he's saying? So I think only in as much as if it's adaptive that means that it was adapted for and would have occurred slowly. But I think you're I was thinking the same thing. I was like what if it turns out that language

[00:50:14] was around for two million years would he just drop this line of thinking? I don't think so. But that I get I get if it's two million years because our our brains and are just our species has done a lot in two million years less so evolutionarily speaking

[00:50:32] in one hundred thousand years. Yeah. The idea as you pointed out that he's saying is like if we're like two million years old as a species the unconscious has been without language for all but a eye blink of that. Yes he says. And so the unconscious

[00:50:49] like knows how to deal with us and how to get our organism through life. And it's like the language is like some annoying little brother or something like that. It's like constantly bothering you and like pulling at your pant leg. What do you think?

[00:51:09] And the unconscious like I got this don't worry about it just shut the fuck up. You know what's weird about this is language is the thing that helps that gives us the problems in the first place. Yeah. So it's like when it says like thousands of

[00:51:25] species have had perfectly fine time living without language. Yeah I think that's true. But all of the so much of what we have and our ability to cooperate and coordinate and communicate is only because of language. All of the modern problems we face seem to have

[00:51:42] some connection to our ability to have language. So I do love though back to what you said like there is McCarthy is making this into a story about like a Cain and Abel. I guess like a two there's characters here. The language is obviously amazing and awesome.

[00:52:02] But there is like either either the little brother or some deep resentment like the Cain and Abel like the unconscious clearly language has dominated so much of what it means to be human nowadays that the unconscious is salty. I see more that he thinks like

[00:52:22] the unconscious is like Alice Waring and language is like some hoopla head that comes into the gym. You know it's going to raise another headache for Al you know. And now that's just another thing for him to deal with. But this idea of the unconscious not trusting language

[00:52:44] and not wanting like that's why it doesn't present the solution in the language it goes through some more mysterious means to give us the answer. It's because like it doesn't it doesn't trust language. And I thought that this aspect of it is pretty interesting because

[00:53:03] his idea is that language has it's like good points but also it is an obstacle to understanding the world. He said facts does the unconscious only get facts from us I guess meaning language us or does it have the same access to our sensorium that we have.

[00:53:21] You can do whatever you like with the us and the are and the we I did at some point the mind must grammatize facts and convert them to narrative. The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that.

[00:53:37] So what do you make of that passage. Yeah I like I mean I like the thought that that the facts of the world as they present themselves are obviously processed by by some aspect of our mind that doesn't require language. And so that we are converting them

[00:53:55] to turn them into narratives. So he says we have to do that. Now obviously animals don't but maybe just the human condition is that we do because so much of our time is spent thinking about how to tell somebody else something right maybe or maybe even tell ourselves

[00:54:11] something maybe it doesn't even require that communication that we were just like a human being that we were just like converting all of the facts of our life into a story that we find pleasing to tell ourselves. Just to conceptualize the problem just to be able

[00:54:26] to think about it in a conscious way. If we want to put it into the realm of conscious deliberation we have to convert facts to narratives and clearly that is often useful. The whole Kukulia problem couldn't have happened if we didn't do that. But I think there's

[00:54:46] a cost to doing that because it's like modeling. Once you start to conceptualize the world and divide it up into concepts you are going to lose some aspect of reality some aspect of the truth and maybe it's the unconscious doesn't trust language because of that.

[00:55:05] Because it's a liar. Yeah I think that's right or at least what he's trying to argue and central to what he's saying about language is that language fundamentally is representing one thing is saying one thing is something else. Yeah. That where the unconscious might just take in that

[00:55:24] thing obviously there's still representation but language is this way of of representing something so concretely that is clearly something else like it's taking the place of that thing and like as you're saying something gets lost when you see a pretty landscape and then you write down a

[00:55:47] description of that like there is a lot of information that is getting completely lost in that description. Right. And and so you what you you would really trust is just the straight up perception of the scene that representation that middleman of language has the power to mislead

[00:56:08] which as I think about it it's like so much I think of what you are often saying about this stuff it's like the representation of the thing is degraded from the thing to the point where we can't trust it. Exactly. Sorry Nate Silver but you can't model everything

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[00:58:45] dollars a year. So maybe that can be some motivation to give it a try. Last time rocket money dot com slash BBW our thanks to rocket money for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. I just want to read this this little passage says the

[00:59:01] evolution of language would begin with the names of things after that would come descriptions of these things and descriptions of what they do. The rule is that they are charged with describing the world. There's nothing else to describe. The role of language in naming

[00:59:14] things I think is already starting to to degrade the representation that the unconscious has been used to to having. There might almost be something platonic about this. It's like although actually I don't know I take that back I would have to think about that more.

[00:59:33] But well he certainly has the idea of a degraded reality. The more particular you get. But I actually think he might think it goes the other way that language is the thing that's going to help us get to the true essence of things.

[00:59:44] Well this is where I think it's a actual paradox for a writer like McCarthy or at least a real dilemma about whose side to be on here because clearly I think he is using language to the best of his ability to try to communicate

[01:00:00] things that I think he thinks are more primitive and more real. Yeah. And that's the only way he could get those things into our mind. Yeah. So if he could bypass that maybe he would be like into that but he can't. So he knows that the better

[01:00:14] that he uses language like the better he's going to be able to communicate the richness of some of these concepts. And what's really funny is like as you were talking and you said like I don't think he says it explicitly. I couldn't put into words what I

[01:00:26] thought about this essay until maybe now that there is so much in this essay that I think is unsaid that I then processed about it like what he's actually trying to say. Right. Exactly. So it's like I don't know if it's a paradox or it's

[01:00:43] these things working in concert. But he says like you say like we need the language to explain things to other people to get them to understand something and often will go to an analogy to do that. Like if you've taught like having a good analogy to explain

[01:01:01] something it can get them to understand it in a way that they absolutely didn't before. But I think McCarthy might say sure but the unconscious processes helped you come up with that analogy helped you know it was a good analogy. And they when they

[01:01:21] get it that's all unconscious to the aha. Yeah. The aha moment is also unconscious and like groking like groking is just something that happens and we push each other with language so that we'll get it. And then when we finally do it's not like we solved the math

[01:01:38] problem by carrying the one or whatever. It's just like oh ah. Let me read this section because I think that he's saying what we're trying to say is when you pause to reflect and say quote let me see how can I put this

[01:01:53] your aim is to resurrect an idea from this pool of we know not what and give it a linguistic form so that it can be expressed. It is this that one wishes to put that is representative of this pool of knowledge whose form is so amorphous.

[01:02:07] If you explain this to someone and they say that they don't understand you may well seize your chin and think some more and come up with another way to put it or you may not. When the physicist Dirac was complained to by students that

[01:02:18] they didn't understand what he'd said Dirac would simply repeat it verbatim. It's funny that like both strategies can work. It's like the second one would just give your unconscious a little more time to get it. Yeah. The his strategy. But yeah it's true.

[01:02:32] Like that is what you're trying to do. You are making an appeal to their unconscious to make a connection that they have not yet made. Yeah. So I want to get back to though that you were asking about whether or not there is like

[01:02:43] some some debate still about whether language was adapted. And I you know I don't know like I'm not an expert in this but I was reading I was going crazy reading this afternoon about some of this language stuff and it's insane because it's like the question. Right.

[01:02:59] But I'll tell you a few things that I thought were interesting. So one of the biggest reasons why people think that it didn't evolve as an adaptation is that unlike so many other systems biological systems there doesn't seem to be an in between state where some some species

[01:03:20] say have a little bit of grammar or a little bit of like recursive and there's no or a little bit of recursive and others. Like the eye, exactly. Yeah, you have some animals that just have just basic photosensitivity and then you have something as complex as us.

[01:03:37] And you can see the in-between. In fact, I think Darwin himself noted this when he was looking at the eyes of various animals, showing the steps at which evolution could build an eye as complicated as this. It seems like for humans it just appeared.

[01:03:52] There is nothing like it. Obviously, there's some, as McCarthy says, there's some animals that do verbal signaling of calls, but there's nothing like what we have. There's no intermediary thing or even close and no record of any intermediary thing. Exactly.

[01:04:07] And I think Paul and Steve Pinker in their article back in the day say, like, look, we just don't have enough evidence from species that might've had something in between. Just because we can't see it now doesn't mean it wasn't there. But, yeah. True, fair enough.

[01:04:24] But his idea is that it spread like a virus. It just hopped on the scene and it finds some place in the brain that isn't used that much and just spreads to everybody else. Yeah, which is incredible. It's incredible when you think about

[01:04:37] what it would've taken for something like that to spread. But when he was talking about language only being around 150,000 years, I was reading up on this and that number, that estimate probably comes from, he doesn't say, but it probably comes from something that he mentioned earlier,

[01:04:52] which is that in order for us to produce the sounds that we produce that are languages across all humans, the larynx had to drop significantly in the throat and we're the only animal that has that. So we have the ability to make all of these different sounds.

[01:05:07] And so what you can do is you can look at the fossil record and you can tell when this happened in humans and that turns out to be plus or minus 100-something thousand years ago. And so that's where people get the estimate because other than that,

[01:05:20] like there's no really good way to try to figure out when this would have started. Right, yeah, yeah. By the way, there's a 20% chance that I died because of that evolutionary adaptation, like choking. I almost choke so often. Like I really think that might be how I die.

[01:05:39] It's just a question of when. I'm on the unconscious' side. We have one of these things at our house that are like, it's like a little, it looks like a little mask, like an oxygen mask on one end and like a pump on the other.

[01:05:54] And so if someone's choking, you just put it over their head and like do, just squeeze and then it'll like suck it out. Really? Basically, so you don't have to do the Heimlich. Yeah, you should get one of these. Oh my God, I'm definitely gonna choke.

[01:06:05] But I am with you. I choke on like my own saliva. I can try. It's just a really bad, like think about how important this adaptation or this ability was that we are, the evolution was like, yeah, you know, they might die from like eating a Lego

[01:06:20] when they're six months old. They'll be able to do a Sonic. They'll have podcasts. Podcasts. Really, the evolutionary pressure for podcasts is what explains all of this stuff. Before we leave the is language, like has it evolved or not? Like where do you stand on that?

[01:06:39] Does Paul still, like is he still committed to the view that language was selected for and is in a spandrel? I don't know. I meant to text him before we recorded, but I didn't get around to it. I suspect that he would

[01:06:54] just because it's his most influential paper. He can't just abandon that line of reasoning. I kind of am convinced by the views that it does. Now, they didn't appear like instantaneously appearing or whatever in evolutionary terms, I guess means thousands upon thousands of years.

[01:07:10] But I'm kind of convinced by the fact that there doesn't seem to be this in-between state in other animals. Like I think it would be weird. Now, maybe it's just a failure of my imagination that I can't imagine how the complexity of language

[01:07:24] could have evolved so like slowly through natural selection. But yeah, like I kind of am with the Chomskys on this. Like I feel like something weird happened to our brains and we were like, hey, combined with our throats kind of dropping in some members of our species,

[01:07:41] we could start representing this thing for that thing. And then it just took off from there. And then once it, because once it happens, like forget about it as they say. And then it's funny because it's like, was that a fluke?

[01:07:56] Like just that you needed the absolute perfect set of circumstances. If that's true, is it like unlikely that other species are advanced because they would have needed language to get there and it's just too improbable? I don't know. I kind of feel that way.

[01:08:14] I was reading some theories about language evolution and it's the most fun thing to read because there are all kinds of weird cockamamie theories about how this could have happened. But of course, like proof is just hard to come by. You can't do it.

[01:08:27] But there are some conceptual constraints, right? It can't just be that like one guy developed like a complex enough eye that he could avoid predators and then he had kids. Like you need more than one person to have developed this. By its nature.

[01:08:41] And so there is one view that this must have happened in some children that had the same mutation and they took their parents' primitive vocalizations and whatever the mutation, and there's like a theory about what that might've been, and created a language between themselves

[01:09:01] and then were able to kind of like brute force some of it into the parents. The idea is that it does actually happen a lot that like say twins will develop their own language. If you have two kids that are raised without anybody talking to them,

[01:09:17] they'll start talking to each other. So then all you, right, that's all you need, but you do need it. You need another person to- Who can do it, yeah. That's also why it's a different thing confronting something with another person. You know, like it's a different thing

[01:09:32] us talking about no country or us processing no country because we're gonna talk about it versus we're not. Totally. You need another person, and some ideas just need to be articulated. You know, I think this is maybe why you and I tend to do the thing

[01:09:50] where we watch something first without taking notes and then we'll watch it to take notes because maybe the fear is that we're interfering with the deeper communication that the work of art is giving us. And we need to let it soak in first.

[01:10:08] Right, we need our unconscious to do your thing and then I'll try to interpret. But if I start trying to interpret before you've even had a chance to do your work, then it's not gonna be as good.

[01:10:19] Yeah, so this is why McCarthy in like No Country for Old Men, he's giving us this vibe, well, I'm interpreting it through the Coen brothers, obviously, but giving this vibe. Like the movie just described doesn't have near the impact that the movie scene does.

[01:10:35] And then at the end, the main character, the sheriff or whatever is telling us about his dreams. It's like this struggle that he's having to communicate this idea. I don't remember the details, but somebody gave us a nice interpretation of the two dreams. Yeah, I saw that too.

[01:10:54] I like this idea, and McCarthy talks about this in this essay, it's almost like our unconscious isn't just the single perspective, it's like a bunch of different things. And so he says, of the known characteristics of the unconscious, its persistence is among the most notable.

[01:11:13] Everyone is familiar with repetitive dreams. Here the unconscious may well be imagined to have more than one voice. He's not getting it, is he? No, he's pretty thick. What do you wanna do? I don't know. Do you wanna try using his mother? His mother is dead.

[01:11:27] What difference does that make? I love this idea of they're just these elders, and they're just trying to get it through our thick language corrupted souls. They're trying to get us to understand something. The idea that they're very frustrated by our inability to get it.

[01:11:48] What do I have to do? Yeah, and there is no requirement that the unconscious mind would need something like a self-represented, like an individual that persists over time. I think we've talked enough about this that I'm convinced that personal identity has so much to do with the narrative

[01:12:07] that we're continuously telling us about our persistence over time and our memories, and we're connecting all these things. The unconscious mind doesn't need that stuff. It's perfectly fine thinking that it's right. And that also I'm convinced that, of course in dreams I'm talking to eight million people,

[01:12:22] but those eight million people are all me. They're all me. That just seems right. I think that this is something that gets hammered home in pretty much all strains of Buddhism is this idea that language and concepts, that our identity is wrapped up in those things.

[01:12:39] Us identifying with thoughts, us identifying with a narrative about ourself. But there's this other level, and that is not confined, much less divided up. You know, it's. Let me read a little bit more about this, the unconscious and the dreams. It says, The unconscious wants to give guidance

[01:13:05] to your life in general, but it doesn't care what toothpaste you use. And while the path which it suggests for you may be broad, it doesn't include going over a cliff. We can see this in dreams. Those disturbing dreams which wake us from sleep are purely graphic.

[01:13:17] No one speaks. These are very old dreams and often troubling. Sometimes a friend can see their meaning where we cannot. The unconscious intends that they be difficult to unravel because it wants us to think about them, to remember them. It doesn't say that you can't ask for help.

[01:13:31] Parables of course often want to resolve themselves into the pictorial. When you first heard of Plato's cave, you said about reconstructing it. So there he's getting into some like union, collective unconscious stuff I think. Like what he says these dreams are old.

[01:13:45] They're old, old archetypes trying to get us to think. I also seems like a real nice expression of like the role of art. It is to exactly do that, right? To get us to think about things. It's not trying to give us information.

[01:14:03] Plato had this idea that philosophy should be like this. It's like no, I'm not telling you the thing to believe. I am showing you how to arrive, getting you to think. But of course that, well no, right. Like sometimes that will be with language

[01:14:18] and sometimes it will not involve language. Yeah, there's no getting around the language part. The minute I think, the minute we start thinking consciously, it's so hard to not think in terms of like how you might communicate to somebody else. Like there really is, yeah.

[01:14:34] But it's not just the language part that's smart. In fact, the unconscious might be a lot smarter than we think. And then it's like language can get in the way. And I just love, my favorite just kind of feature of this essay is this image of the unconscious

[01:14:50] as often frustrated, even though language, like that's the field we play in right now. Like it's still very frustrated that it has to work through language to get people to understand things. Yeah, right. And it will often, if it doesn't have to, it won't.

[01:15:10] Like it will absolutely bypass that if it can. I mean, you know, it's like the only medium we really have of communication. Like I don't want to downplay, like it's incredible the things that we can put into other people's brains because we can structure in language.

[01:15:22] And like the recursive nature of language and the ability to combine ideas, this combinatorial feature of grammar, it's incredible. Like it's better than anything else. But that doesn't mean that we don't have like millions of years of this like, you know,

[01:15:38] like this monster lurking in the deepest of oceans waiting for us to like talk to it. Can I read the last? I don't know if you want to. Let's go to the last paragraph. Yeah, he says, the unconscious seems to know a great deal.

[01:15:52] What does it know about itself? Does it know that it's going to die? What does it think about that? It appears to represent a gathering of talents rather than just one. It seems unlikely that the itch department is also in charge of math.

[01:16:03] Can it work on a number of problems at once? Does it only know what we tell it? Or more plausibly, has it direct access to the outer world? Some of the dreams which it is at pains to assemble for us are no doubt deeply reflected

[01:16:14] and yet some are quite frivolous. And the fact that it appears to be less than insistent upon our remembering every dream suggests that sometimes it may be working on itself. And is it really so good at solving problems or is it just that it keeps its own counsel

[01:16:26] about the failures? How does it have this understanding which we might well envy? How might we make inquiries of it? Are you sure? God, I'm such a good editor. So good. If you're only gonna write one essay. I know. This is like not bad.

[01:16:45] I think there's so much in here. We've talked about a lot of it, but I'm a little surprised that he raises the question of whether the unconscious has direct access to the outer world. Because he does that earlier in the essay too. And it's like, well obviously,

[01:16:57] because it's the thing that's been around for two million years. And he even calls it like a machine to operate an animal. I think it's arguing against an idea that we filter all sensory experience through language first before it can get to our unconscious.

[01:17:16] But that doesn't seem plausible. Right, right. Yeah, and I like the idea that dreams, because a lot of dreams are frivolous. I feel like I have a lot of frivolous dreams. Yeah, of course. It's not all deep, right? Yeah, it's not all gonna be deep.

[01:17:27] And even when he was saying these dreams are old, my notion was yeah, some problems are old as in existential and about life's meaning and wisdom. And some are about like, don't walk over that cliff, right? Like there or like, don't let that snake actually bite you.

[01:17:46] Those are also deeply, deep part of what it means to be an animal in a world like this. What do you think of this part? And is it really so good at solving problems or is it just that it keeps its own counsel about the failures?

[01:17:59] The idea being like, is it so good or do we only like know about when it solves the problems we don't know about when it fucks us? That seems right, right? That seems right. No one's gonna write an essay about when Kukule dreamed

[01:18:12] about a bird and it had no effect on his knowledge of the Benzene. That's right. Yeah. And I also love does it know that it's gonna die? Yeah. Again, you would think, well, yeah, right? Yeah, right. Although I guess dogs don't know that they're gonna die

[01:18:33] or do they? I don't know. Right before you're about to kill them. They're like, oh fuck, he's got the needle. He got the fucking needle. Or like in No Country for Old Men, do you think when the dog was in the air

[01:18:48] and he had just loaded his gun, he was like, oh fuck. Like Freud would say it's so intent on survival but maybe a lot of the times it's just actually not concerned with that. I don't know. Let's ask him. We can't know. That's the other thing.

[01:19:09] It is a black box. It's like chat GPT, non-chat GPT. Yeah, non-chat GPT. Title. All right, any other thoughts about this? No, my only thought was I wish I'd gotten into Cormac McCarthy earlier. Yeah, well you have a lot of good shit to read.

[01:19:31] I got a lot, yeah. All right, join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.