Episode 267: The Thickness of Reality

[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. Preparation, preparation, preparation.

[00:00:19] As far as the actual job's concerned, it's a piece of piss. A monkey could do it, that's what's all for you. The great and Oz has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind us. And with no more brains than you have, pay no-

[00:01:01] 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.

[00:01:15] Dave, a few days ago I was in Roswell, New Mexico, and I went to the UFO Museum and Research Center. And now my eyes are wide fucking open. Just tell me, I'm not gonna be mad, are you a part of all this?

[00:01:31] Are you just assigned to keep an eye on me in case I start learning too much? Fuck. All this, 11 years? It's actually the APA has been in cahoots with the government. What we do is anal probe unsuspecting citizens. It's kind of like the waterboard thing, you know?

[00:01:49] We're not exactly that ethical about this. I do have this nightmare from Montana when we were there. Shh, just let it happen. Now how was the museum? First of all, who runs that museum? One of the funders is actually one of the lieutenants or retired army people

[00:02:07] that was pressured into saying it was just a weather balloon. Apparently, according to our story right now, was some sort of CIA top secret nuclear detection device or something like that. But he provided some funding. I think Stanton Friedman, if I'm right about that, big ufologist.

[00:02:33] There was a weird synchronicity though. I was traveling there because we were on a road trip with my daughter, camping and stuff. We were listening to a podcast on it. One of the podcasts is called The Lovecraft Investigations. Which had an unbelievable outstanding first season.

[00:02:49] And then the second season was very good but kind of tailed off. Third season, fuck, it was like dark. But in the second season, it's a Lovecraft thing. So it's not about UFOs, it's more about... The old ones? Yeah, the old ones. Exactly. Like literally, the old ones.

[00:03:07] But there was a UFO element. And the thing they're talking about is something that happened in 1980 in the forests of Great Britain. So we're just listening to this and then we get to Roswell. We're kind of on our way home at this point.

[00:03:21] And there's this big exhibit on that thing in Roswell. It was like we felt a little freaked out by it. It was good. There's a lot of stuff that's interesting. I didn't vet it, so I don't know how much of it. But there's a lot of shit.

[00:03:39] The first part of the museum is devoted entirely to the Roswell incident. And there's a lot of stuff that I kind of heard little bits of. But you get actually primary materials there. And it's kind of cool. Nice. Well, that's good.

[00:03:55] I am all full in agreement for having a podcast. I'm all full in agreement for having that sense of wonder tickled when you go to stuff like that, as skeptical as I am. It does a good job at that.

[00:04:05] I want to say that if anybody wants to hear Tamler talk more about UFOs, become a patron. Because you and Bob put out your most recent Overton Windows episode about UFOs, right? Yeah. Settled the debate? Expanded it. Allowed it to breathe.

[00:04:23] And if it weren't for people like you just trying to keep me under wraps, maybe we'd get somewhere. This whole podcast is really about keeping you under wraps. It's a psyop. I'm flattered, honestly. We should say what we're going to talk about on this episode.

[00:04:37] So in the main segment, we're doing a William James essay? What was the title? It's the Pluralistic Universe. It's the collection of UFOs. And it's a collection of UFOs. And it's a collection of UFOs. What was the title? It's the Pluralistic Universe. It's the collected lectures.

[00:04:55] And we're doing... Lecture 6. Henri Bersan and his critique of intellectualism. We recorded that already. Dave, you might be surprised, tried to defend intellectualism. Well, I put on my smoking jacket and my pipe and talked about... You just want to go back to when A.J. Eyre...

[00:05:15] I kind of do. I kind of want to smoke a pipe while I'm lecturing. But first, what are we going to talk about first in this segment? So this is an article... Actually, I found it at least via Neuroskeptic. But it's an article in PsychScience called

[00:05:29] Are People Generous When the Financial Stakes Are High? By Ryan Dwyer, William Brady, Liz Dunn and Mr. Ted himself, Chris Anderson. This is a single study where they did something that was a little bit different than a single study

[00:05:47] where they did something that I have not seen done before. They got some rich donors to donate $10,000 to 200 people. The purpose of the experiment was to try to find out how pro-social people are with their donations. How unselfish are they going to be? Unselfish here meaning

[00:06:07] spending money on other people rather than themselves. They were required to spend all $10,000 within three months. So like, three-stories-millions? Exactly! And they wanted to try a manipulation to see if reputational considerations were drivers of this kind of generosity. So half of the people were required to tweet about

[00:06:35] the receiving of the money and what they were going to do with it. And the other half were told about the money. They could tell their family and friends or whatever, but just not social media. Right. And yeah, I mean, I think that the findings

[00:06:51] were kind of surprising. Overall there was no difference between the public and the private groups. And overall, $6,000 on average was spent on pro-social purchases. And here this $6,000 is the pro-social in the broadest definition of the word. So if we spent it on anybody, like if we spent it

[00:07:11] on our daughters or on our wives or whatever. On a more narrow definition of spending money on people outside of your household, people spent on average $2,000 of the $10,000. So like 22% of the money was used on other people. And so part

[00:07:33] of the paper is arguing that like, oh, on the homo economicus, like the ultra self-interested rational view, like people should donate $0 to others. Which is kind of just like a super straw man. But their main prediction that they pre-registered was that

[00:07:47] there would be a difference between the private and public condition and there wasn't. Well, whether there was or not is actually I think debatable. But we can get to that. I do like the idea of raising the stakes. I think this is one of the problems with

[00:08:05] so much of these kinds of studies is you're talking about amounts that there's no reason to think that whatever you do in this weird game you're playing for a few dollars or $10 or whatever. $10 usually is like the highest amount in many of these like economic games that are

[00:08:23] done in the lab. Right. And so then it's like, I just don't buy that that reflects anything about your character or generosity in a broader kind of condition than that. So this the idea of giving them like a shitload of money, like giving them $10,000

[00:08:39] I think is a good one. And when I first just looked at the results and it's like, oh, no different between public and private. That's interesting. Also that they gave that much outside their household. That's really almost encouraging. It's like you feel good about human nature. You

[00:08:57] dive into it and there's like two big problems I would say that I have with it. Number one, that how they recruited their candidates for this. So the idea was they pretended this was some mysterious experiment they were running and so they talk about like how they

[00:09:17] looked at low income countries and high income countries, but everyone was a TED watcher. Everybody that was part that could have received this money was someone that watches TED videos. Or just follow the TED tweets. Or follow the TED Twitter. Right. That's a relatively

[00:09:37] minor thing, but I think it does it is a biased sample. Just somebody who's interested enough to follow TED on Twitter and is on Twitter. Like that is a thing with over 100 followers. I guess my bigger issue, and maybe I'm misguided about this,

[00:09:53] when they say there's no difference between public and private condition they're talking about the number of like how much total that you spend. On others and not just yourself. But I think there's a huge difference between spending on family in the household versus outside the household. Right?

[00:10:15] Like I don't consider it charity or not on myself if I buy Eliza something or buy my wife something, right? That's like practically spending it on myself. And when you look at total donations, so then yes there's no difference. But when you look at family in the household

[00:10:35] percentage, it's 38% for the private condition. 29% for the public condition. And when you look at the actual donations to local or national organizations, so not even friends stuff like that then you also see a big difference. 16% in the public condition, 10% in the private for local organization and 8% versus 5%

[00:11:03] for national organizations. So I think it's not a fair way of describing their results to say that there's no difference between public and private. But when you run the statistics, like those aren't reliable differences. They have the p-values right there. These were not significant differences given the distribution

[00:11:21] in the sample. I can't speak to that but they look in terms of the percentages of how much they gave maybe it's, you know, that's just noise or whatever. But that is what you'd expect I think. I wouldn't have expected a difference larger than what you see there.

[00:11:41] Public and private in the results. So maybe that's not significant but there's no reason to think that means it's the same more than it means that it's even more different. Well, I think that's what it does mean. I mean it is pretty basic statistics.

[00:11:55] Like I think that maybe what you're getting when you get to those numbers is less power to detect a real difference but those numbers in themselves you can't like the statistics are really saying like you cannot tell if these two are actually any different from each other.

[00:12:13] But why would you then assume then they're the same? That's the part that I don't buy. Like you can't just assume the null if the differences aren't significant because it could just as easily be a greater difference than those things. There's no reason to think that those numbers

[00:12:29] this is just now pure statistics thing about arguing for the null but that's not like kosher as I understand it. You can't argue, you can't prove the null. So that's, I mean so in the results they did what's called equivalence testing. That is a method to try to

[00:12:51] see if this is really the kind of pattern you'd expect if the null were true and that turns out to be like supportive. It does seem like these aren't different. But I mean they are different so like it doesn't seem like it's not different. It's

[00:13:09] just that you're like Yeah the numbers are different. Like if there was one dollar difference there would be a difference too. Right? But you would say But that's not a reliable... There's the percentage of difference that you might expect if the null wasn't true

[00:13:21] Yeah I mean like... And I know what you're saying but that's just like making it too easy for you guys like then if you can just assume that the null is true because you can't prove that the null isn't true. No, right like so

[00:13:33] on the hypothesis that there would be a difference you can't if you assume that that there is no difference these numbers would be consistent with that. Right? Like so I mean it's like that's just how all hypothesis testing works right? You can't

[00:13:53] It's true you can't prove it and that's what these equivalents they did these exploratory equivalence tests to try it to see whether the... You can really provide any positive evidence that these are not different from each other. But yeah like it's very like I mean yeah

[00:14:07] it's just how hypothesis I understand how like that works but their hypothesis was not borne out. So if you say this provides some bit of evidence against the hypothesis or it certainly doesn't provide evidence for the hypothesis totally agree I just don't buy that it

[00:14:27] presents any kind of significant evidence against the hypothesis Yeah all you can say is you can't reject the null like it's that's true that's all you can really say. So the exploratory analyses that they didn't even pre-register where they're trying to find out with these equivalence tests

[00:14:45] if these two aren't really different from each other actually did yield that one in the public condition people spent more on people in their household but nothing else emerged I don't... Here's what I don't get like we don't need to put this in but

[00:14:59] very clearly when you look at the results said that the percentage is higher for in the household in the private than the public by 9% In the... With inside households 38 to 29% I just don't see how that's like you can't just say actually an

[00:15:21] exploratory testing like no those are the actual numbers from the study Yeah but all they're saying is that those numbers don't actually cross the threshold to be able to say that that's a true reliable difference and that those numbers fall well within the range of numbers you'd

[00:15:37] expect to see if the null hypothesis is true. Sure right but you can't say an exploratory testing where there's... It's actually that you would spend more in your household in the public than the private when the numbers just don't support that at all

[00:15:53] Exploratory analysis gives us the participants in the public condition spent more on people in their household Oh yeah actually It seems like they've said it wrong I think they might have just said that wrong I think that what they're saying is that the one result

[00:16:07] that does emerge is that people in the private spend more on their household. That might actually be a real like error in the report because they say exploratory analysis suggests that participants in the public condition spent more on people in

[00:16:23] their household and that's just not what the table shows. Right that was... The table shows the opposite Yeah I think that's an error yeah The new Data Colada Hamler Summers and David Pizarro from like the Skeptic. We're like the X-Files you know

[00:16:39] This is the closest I've looked at numbers in a while I could tell. I've been inspired By the way Data Colada go donate to their crowd campaign Yeah yeah you're right so what they do report, I think they just said it wrong

[00:16:55] is the one difference that seemed to emerge is that people in the public condition give less to people in their own household than in the private condition so this suggests that maybe something is going on there That was all I had Yeah yeah okay

[00:17:13] I understand you don't like to look at the numbers but I like to get into the weeds No I thought you were saying that despite the non-significance that like the numbers are different What would you say of the $10,000 what would you think people would spend on people not

[00:17:27] in their immediate household Yeah I mean like it really depends $10,000 means a different thing to you and me than it means Francesca Gino Obviously like the billionaires of the world and then the really poor people of the world so like if people were like us I would think

[00:17:47] that yeah it was like oh this is a huge windfall definitely I'm going to spread the wealth a little bit I would make my daughter move out and then give her a bunch of money so that I could count as giving outside of my household That's cute

[00:18:01] Yeah I guess you know if it's as Neuroskeptic said in his tweet like windfall money really is different I don't think that means that these aren't results that are meaningful because people do get large chunks of money that they didn't expect and there's no reason to think that

[00:18:17] people would be that generous but I do think that like if it's money that's a total windfall spending money like helping my closest relatives if they have any credit card debt that's totally something I would do but yeah I think 30% is about right I

[00:18:41] totally agree with that and that's the last little quibble I would have with this is they compare this to inheritance and I just don't think it's the same you don't look at inheritance as the kind of windfall that this is. You're expecting that shit your

[00:18:57] whole life you know? Yeah exactly You're like counting the days. I don't know how this is going to translate to that but I'm sure there's another study that's gonna come and find actually the inheritance spending and windfall spending are you can't prove that this difference is significant

[00:19:15] according to our study Alright well we'll be right back to talk about William James and yeah that's it We're on point today Maybe you're trying to decide on whether to make a change in your career or you realize that something about your relationship needs to

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[00:25:25] audio series and you can vote for the Patreon listener selected episode which we run about every 6 months. It looks like we just had one that Blood Meridian took down Solaris and William James but William James has the last laugh since we're talking about him first today

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[00:25:59] so there's a lot going on we hope you're enjoying those the Q&As, we really like them and honestly I couldn't be more grateful, both of us could not be more grateful. We appreciate all of your support so much thank you. Let's get to this lecture, the 6th

[00:26:17] lecture in William James' 1909 work A Pluralistic Universe the lecture itself is called Berlissant and his critique I was wondering if you were going to go for the French pronunciation. Berlissant? I don't know, you do it you're better at accents. I'm going to do Henri Bergson maybe Henri

[00:26:39] Bergson. Henri Bergson yeah let's compromise this was recommended to us by a long time listener and someone who is very like-minded in his view of philosophy and science Farid Anwari he's like a good in-between between me and you, like he's

[00:26:59] probably closer to you but he pushes you too sometimes. Yeah he also nominated it for the listener selected episode on Patreon and I think it came in second place but the winner of that is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, we'll probably do that next right? Yeah

[00:27:17] it's just going to take us a little bit longer I think to prepare for that one so you didn't win Farid but you did also because we're talking about it this is, I think it's his last completed book, he published it he gave these lectures but then collected

[00:27:35] them and published them a year before he died at 69, I didn't know that he died that young. He's kind of the GOAT how many people have made had that much of an influence on two fields entirely basically birthed American psychology and I feel like in their

[00:27:55] honest moments both philosophers and psychologists want to get back to more of what he was doing and feel like their fields have strayed a little bit certainly, I believe that but I think a lot of people at least sometimes believe that. I think particularly his ability and willingness

[00:28:13] to do big picture stuff yeah, so many psychologists quote William James clearly they're envying something so this lecture discusses the French philosopher Henri Bergson and his criticisms of the dominant strain of western philosophy. James was like 20 years older roughly than Bergson but he had been

[00:28:39] a long time kind of admirer and champion of his work he says he took a lot of inspiration from Bergson now this essay, obviously I'm going to love any kind of hardcore criticism of conceptual analysis but the real distinctive contribution for me was how James connects

[00:29:01] this critique of conceptual analysis with this other old debate. Two views one that reality and life is in constant flux that's the essence of reality is that it's constantly changing versus the view that like actually everything is static, change is an illusion the truly real things

[00:29:23] are static and unchanging so you had Heraclitus maybe the most prominent ancient Greek philosopher arguing for the flux view and Parmenides arguing that all change was an illusion and then after Parmenides comes Plato who according to James argued that the changeless entities were the more real

[00:29:45] that particular and constantly evolving things are just bastardized approximate versions of what their real unchanging essence is as James describes it like the real essence of a thing according to Plato is the definition and we get that definition through this method of conceptual analysis now I'm actually

[00:30:09] agnostic about whether Plato truly believed this but he definitely presented the view in considerable depth and James says I think this is right that at least in western philosophy this view of reality and also the methods of philosophy became dominant and everybody played the game on those terms

[00:30:31] on that turf whether you were an empiricist or a rationalist or an idealist or an absolutist he sometimes says you were all playing on those terms and maybe you get a Nietzsche or a Birkson later on but they're late they're outliers and according to James

[00:30:49] they're right he doesn't talk about Nietzsche at all but Birkson and that view is right and yeah so I love that connection of the changing nature of reality with the critique of conceptual analysis I never made that connection before at least as much as I remember

[00:31:07] and finally last thing I'll say the way he introduces this idea is through these kind of paradoxes or antimonies like Zeno's paradox that tie philosophers up in knots but according to James and Birkson are based on this misguided quote unquote intellectualist assumption about so we'll get to that

[00:31:31] but I'm actually very curious what did you think in general of this lecture so I'm a huge fan of James I don't think I can read something that I won't admire of his I haven't at least yet later you know later life James when he

[00:31:49] starts getting a bit more toward this end of his eschewing like this rationality maybe like I don't know how to describe it maybe a move toward the more mystical view of life and existence is to me less satisfying than principles of psychology James you know 1890 or whatever

[00:32:09] I almost think that he's holding back his mysticism at this point in his life there's a reading of this that I find to be fairly reasonable there's a different reading though that leaves me wondering if he's like not just completely gone off his rocker

[00:32:29] so that's kind of what I want to talk to you about some of the stuff that like what exactly he means well I have some questions about like what exactly he means in a couple places but like in terms of my general impression this is like heroin

[00:32:45] this is philosophy heroin you were texting me as much just feed this to me and I'll suck your dick you'll experience the thickness of his reality yeah exactly so I love it I think like I said I just love that aspect of it this connection

[00:33:05] I guess I believe James that this is Bergson who presented this position but I'd like to learn a lot more about him and his work because if the listener has like here's a manageable chunk of Bergson that you should argue about preferably in its original French

[00:33:23] yes alright because we can both do that but okay so here is like I'll just say a couple of big questions that I have one well the first isn't so big a question but it is to me I'm curious who this enemy

[00:33:37] that he refers to as intellectualism is because it seems to me that like it's more of a sentiment that he's attacking than or maybe he's lumping together a bunch of different ideas like what you described and calling those things intellectualism but I wasn't sure because

[00:33:55] he never really says what he means by intellectualism so I did kind of look through the other lectures yeah me too yeah he doesn't really mention it at all well no he does he does like I would say especially in lecture five here's a quote that

[00:34:11] I found from the fifth lecture that was a little more illuminating for me intellectualism has as its source in the faculty which gives our chief superiority to the brutes our power namely of translating the crude flux of our merely feeling experience into conceptual order an immediate experience

[00:34:35] as yet unnamed or classed is a mere that that we undergo a thing that asks what am I when we name it and class it we say for the first time what it is and all these what's are abstract names or concepts intellectualism in the vicious sense

[00:34:53] begins with Socrates and Plato ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences not of appearances and that the essence of things are known whenever we know their definitions so first we identify the thing with a concept then we identify the concept

[00:35:09] with a definition and only then in as much as the thing is what the definition expresses are we sure of apprehending the real essence or the full truth about it so that's one kind of definition of it that's kind of at least as he

[00:35:25] thinks he's presenting it neutral the next sentence is so far no harm done it's just when these concepts become tyrannies or that we can get ourselves bogged down in like something like Zeno's paradox which just takes these concepts with have some kind of practical use

[00:35:43] for us in organizing our experience and mistakes it for the reality and then come up with logical contradictions but that's the contradictions aren't in the world the contradictions are just in our like essentially imperfect way of modeling experience with our concepts I guess

[00:36:05] there are a few things that that I think he maybe is slippery about in his use of this term because like I get on the one hand what he could be saying is these specific views like that defended by Socrates or Aristotle that there exists these

[00:36:25] essences and that we once we define them we get to know them like you can argue against that but it does sound like he's mounting the like the use of that term sounds like he's mounting something broader like a rejection of the use of reason for accessing external

[00:36:39] truth and I don't know that that's what he's doing like I think it's a specific kind of like a specific tradition within like using your intellect systematic theoretical that side of reason yeah but that's so much of what reason is like even just like the use of concepts

[00:36:57] at all in anything like it sounds like he's trying right he's not even like you were saying that it's sort of an attack on conceptual analysis but it's really an attack on concepts not even just conceptual analysis by me obviously you need the

[00:37:13] former for the latter but it's bigger than just like that particular methodology that modern analytic philosophy uses it's like any reliance on concepts and so at times I was like well is he really against the use of math as in what Zeno's paradox is kind of showing that

[00:37:31] when you start getting into infinitesimals like you start entering paradoxes and it's our desire to use even the most basic of logical methods to describe the world or is it more like the methodology that certain philosophers use or is it just in general like

[00:37:49] it's not that he has anything against concepts thought of properly when they're understood as subordinate to the experience and not something that is has a reality in and of itself it's that's the thing the whole assumption that underlies conceptual analysis is if we nail down this concept we

[00:38:15] will have figured out something real that we that isn't available to just experiencing the thing that's the thing that he's against I think he thinks if you use concepts as a way of organizing your experience and as a way of making predictions in science

[00:38:31] and all of that fine just don't mistake that for reality because fundamentally reality is this constant flux of immediate pure experience and concepts have to be you know they're the map rather than the reality itself and philosophers are confusing the map with the thing that it

[00:38:55] the territory the territory yeah yeah like if what he was saying is um every conceptual framework to describe reality is is simply a model like we're never you know we're only approximating the truth in as much as we can that seems so reasonable like I think most scientists

[00:39:17] believe that like you know whenever scientists come up with a model like they usually are like well yeah like we all we're trying to do is is get better and better at predicting um the way that this thing works like whether or not we're ever describing the actual

[00:39:33] fundamental truth like I don't think that's what he's doing I actually don't think this is even that much of a direct critique I think you could apply it to a critique of science and scientists and their methods but I think this is more a critique of

[00:39:47] the way this uh manifests itself in philosophy and maybe we should talk about like Zeno's paradox and why he thinks something like that is a product of this misguided way so Zeno's paradox is this idea that if you know you have a race between Achilles and the tortoise

[00:40:09] and if the tortoise gets a little bit of a head start then Achilles can't pass the tortoise because every time Achilles gets to where the tortoise was assuming that he's moving continuously the tortoise will have moved a little bit in that time and

[00:40:27] if he just gets to the point where the tortoise is now the tortoise will have moved a little bit and so like Achilles can't pass the tortoise because the tortoise will always be infinitesimally ahead and yet we know from experience that of course people

[00:40:45] can pass other people so I think what he's saying is or what he's attributing to Bergson is this idea that you can only tie yourself up in these kind of knots that these antinomies present, you can only do that if you are mistaking like your conceptual

[00:41:07] framework for understanding experience as an actual real thing rather than just the reality of one person passing another in a race Right, so like motion, Zeno's paradox is like Zeno wanted to conclude that motion doesn't exist and so he thought Right, because of the paradox

[00:41:27] Yeah, so at least on this account of what Zeno believed he was willing to bite the bullet in like the harshest of ways by saying like well, like I would rather trust my thought experiment showing that motion is impossible so yeah, I mean I think

[00:41:43] like I disagree with you that this doesn't apply to very naturally to extend toward an attack I don't have a particular view that scientists might have about what they're doing because of what it means to quantify the world into discrete units but he doesn't go there

[00:42:01] in this essay, you're right. Yeah, so here's a question I have. So you found it like very enlightening that he was bringing together this view on the like immutability and that debate between whether things are in flux whether reality is in flux

[00:42:19] or whether the most real things are unchangeable and immutable but why is it that he says a few times that concepts are by their nature fixed and that's what I could, like I wasn't quite sure what that meant. Like why why isn't this simply solved

[00:42:35] by having the notion that concepts are also changing or that I have the concept of changing like it's certainly... Or fluid, like that concept Yeah. I think because I think he thinks this is essential to concepts, right? Like you can't have that. You can't have

[00:42:53] the idea that empathy means one thing or it's supposed to be bad that empathy in one study well now I'm going to science, means this and in another study... Thank you for calling psychology science Yes, yes You're welcome The whole point of concepts

[00:43:13] is it gives us a way of talking about something and if it can immediately just change overnight not even overnight but in like the next successive moment then it no longer is of any use to us at that point, you know Empathy can't mean giddiness or horniness

[00:43:31] or else like what's it's use to us having the concept at all. So like there is something about these concepts and the more definitely defined ones, the more precisely defined ones are going to be the most unchanging like this can have social political aspects too, you know

[00:43:51] like with something like marriage or what is a woman or like... but if it is that's going to be a fight and it's going to be one that is resisted at every level both philosophically scientifically maybe politically as well. Right I guess like I'm just confused that

[00:44:15] there's nothing in a concept that says that you can't have the concept mean fluid, right? The concept fluid means fluid and so maybe what he just means is... But fluid doesn't change, like fluid doesn't suddenly mean static. Right, but like yeah, but like fluid

[00:44:31] is a concept that is exactly about change right? So like it's not right? Like the concept is about change. So there are so many conceptual tools that we have to describe fluidity and change that it seems weird to equate the very notion of concepts with

[00:44:49] like that inability to be changeable. I think he thinks that in practice the problem is... so maybe you're right in some kind of ideal use of concepts would achieve this perfect balance of flexibility but in reality they end up distorting our view of the world

[00:45:13] often, not always. In fact I think he thinks they're often extremely helpful and potentially illuminating but it's where we then start to think, oh this part of experience is devalued because it doesn't match the concept which definitely happens in philosophy and science that that does happen

[00:45:37] and I think he thinks this is a symptom of this fundamental mistrust of, I don't want to say lived experience but what he calls raw experience or pure perception that isn't... and here's where I think the mysticism comes out in this essay like I think he thinks

[00:45:57] it's precisely when this experience isn't mediated by concepts that we can actually grasp the full truth of what's happening. Concepts will maybe help us organize it in a way that we can wrap our heads around it at times but it will also make us... it will turn us

[00:46:19] away ever so slightly or in some cases drastically from the thing itself that we experience as like, you know, he's trying to overcorrect for what I think is a definitely real tendency in philosophy here to lionize the concepts at the expense of the experience and to think that

[00:46:43] the experience should be subordinate to the concept rather than vice versa. Right. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you once again by Rocket Money. You know a couple months ago I said here that Rocket Money had found a subscription

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[00:49:15] actually his critique goes way deeper than any particular reliance by philosophers even though I know he's using that as an example. And so just now in thinking about what he's saying I think that he is arguing against the practice of abstraction in general and

[00:49:37] our normal human use of it, like our use of concepts just in daily life. Because I think you're right, he thinks of it as a way in which we make sense of the world so that we can navigate pragmatically. But I think that he

[00:49:49] thinks that the minute that we start acquiring concepts and abstracting from instances, that there is a mistake being made. And that philosophy is like the at least the philosophers he's talking about are the extreme version of that. But I think

[00:50:03] that he's going down deep. So when he says we of course need a stable scheme of concepts, stably related with one another to lay hold of our experiences and to coordinate them with all. When an experience comes with sufficient saliency

[00:50:15] to stand out, we keep the thought of it for future use and store it in our conceptual system. What does not of itself stand out, we learn to cut out. So the system grows completer and new reality as it comes gets named after

[00:50:27] and conceptually strung upon this or that element of it which we have already established. The immutability of such an abstract system is its great practical merit. The same identical terms and relations in it can always be recovered and referred to. Chains itself is just such an unalterable

[00:50:41] concept. Directly responding to what I was saying. So, you know, in his principles of psychology, James has this famous – people quote it all the time in psychology – where he describes the baby's sensory experience as a – he describes the baby's world as a blooming, buzzing confusion. And he means

[00:51:01] by that that because, you know, James being the empiricist that he is, he believes that you need exposure to, you know, you need to have actual experience to make sense of the world around you. And he believes that since the baby didn't have experience yet, that

[00:51:15] there were no categories, there were no concepts, there were none of these reality crutches to allow the baby to make sense of the world. So that was something like a more pure experience. But then as time goes on, the baby starts developing concepts. And so I think

[00:51:31] just in the way that the baby develops concepts as he says is by finding like things and when you find two things that are alike, you cut out the differences and now you have a new concept and you use that to move along. It's directly relevant

[00:51:45] to the Borges Funes, the Memorius, when he talks about abstraction as ignoring differences. So I think – do you agree with this? That I think the critique goes down to just like what it means to even human concepts that allow us – like they're pragmatically very useful

[00:52:03] and we probably couldn't live without them. But I think he's getting to this deep metaphysical point that, well, the only real true things is the stuff before that. Like the stuff before we start forcing things into groupings and abstracting away. So he says,

[00:52:19] we are so subject to the philosophical tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth, and then to fall back on raw, unverbalized life as more of a revealer and to think of concepts as merely practical things which Bergson calls them,

[00:52:37] comes very hard. It is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason. But difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way, supporting your point I believe, to the possession of reality

[00:52:51] and I permit myself to hope that some of you may share my opinion after the next – so he's essentially saying like you need beginner's mind here I think. Like concepts in a lot of like the Buddhist practice, concepts are the thing that you are trying to not

[00:53:07] bring to meditative experience. You are just in search of the raw experience and that's like the mind when you're a child or a baby and the world is blooming budging. It's kind of almost a tragedy, like a tragedy in a sense. Because it's but like that's I think

[00:53:29] where he lands. So there's actually in the appendix he has a definition of pure, what he calls pure experience. He says, Pure experience is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

[00:53:51] Only newborn babies or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, though ready to be all sorts of whats, full both of oneness

[00:54:07] and of manyness but in respects that don't appear, changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points either of distinction or of identity can be caught. Yeah. He says earlier, the intellect carves joints where there are none. And I think he thinks that's essential to

[00:54:27] this kind of systematic way of abstracting from the world that we do. Okay, so here's my other big question. I think I'm fine with him up and about the abstractions giving you less and less reality the more and more you abstract. Do you know, by the way,

[00:54:47] have you heard of the coastline paradox or the coastline problem before? So it's this very cool thing that if you try to measure the coastline say like the coastline of England, you want to say how long, how many miles is the coastline of England? And you

[00:55:03] take a measurement and the way that you do it since the coastline is jagged is you obviously have to like take some straight you know, like straight lines and map them onto the coastline and every time you use a straight line say like a yardstick, you are

[00:55:17] erasing some of the little jagged parts within that. But it happened at one point that two surveys of the same coastline yielded such wildly different estimates that they figured out that it's because they used like different sticks, different size lines. And it turns out that just

[00:55:39] the smaller the stick you use to abstract away that little distance, the longer the coastline is going to be calculated to the point that infinitesimally small lines are going to yield infinitesimally large coastlines. So this is just to say that there is no true answer to how

[00:55:55] big is the coastline of England. It's like actually indeterminate, right? There's not an answer. And that's what I thought about abstraction. Like abstraction is that like choosing to put a straight line over the jagged edges because what you really want to know

[00:56:09] is how long it's going to take a fucking ship to sail around England, right? So you're purposefully ignoring something because it's going to work, because you don't need that level of information. And what James seems to be saying is like yeah, that's all well and good.

[00:56:23] In fact, I can probably build a theory of pragmatism where I can call that truth with like a lowercase T. But if you really want to know what reality is, just let the experience sink in and don't use any straight lines for the jagged edges. Don't try to

[00:56:41] measure it. Don't try to control it. Don't try to just... Live every moment without abstract, yeah. Without like noting the similarities and differences. So here's what I was really left wondering, which is because like I buy that experience independent of abstraction or concepts is going to be

[00:57:01] a very different thing and maybe closer to the pure. But why put any faith in that our experience is yielding anything that's true? Like why is it that he seems to value so highly our sensory experience, like that pure experience independent of abstraction?

[00:57:21] Why not go full content and say well like actually the way that we acquire information about the world around us is already flawed and fucked up. So we shouldn't trust that as yielding anything close to truth. So like maybe the truth, the external world is just something completely

[00:57:39] unknowable. It's neither knowable through our sensory organs via like the pure experience that he's talking about, nor through the blood, sweat and tears of conceptual analysis. It's almost like he's an idealist. But no, he's not because he has a lot of separate arguments against

[00:57:55] Hegel and Kant and where he thinks they go wrong. But I totally take your point that there is a faith in raw experience that you might wonder why is that justified? And I think maybe this is at this point, the mystical assumption is that you

[00:58:17] know truth when you experience it in a certain way. And that's why he believes that you know, that this kind of experience can bring you knowledge. I think that is kind of the Buddhist answer to your question is I can't explain to you why this is

[00:58:39] giving you truth. This is illuminating because that would be to use concepts and I would be bastardizing what we're talking about. But I will say like just if you do the thing, you will get more and more of a sense the more

[00:58:55] you do it of what we're talking about. But it's always this tension because you're always trying to sometimes in the kind of teaching process of any kind of mystical practice you are using concepts and you're using concepts that are heavily involved, constant flux and change to get you

[00:59:15] to that point. It's not a satisfying answer to your question but it is I think the answer that he gives is ultimately this is something that you have to do and open to if you're going to be convinced of its truth. I don't think

[00:59:31] there's a way to be antecedently convinced that raw experience is reliable. It's interesting. I think he must have particular antipathy toward philosophers who use concepts in ways that are so useless because at least scientists are using conceptual tools to yield some utility but there

[00:59:57] is a particular kind of mental masturbation that... Yeah, like take a Gettier problem. I think he would say it's based on this fundamental confusion that there's this real thing, knowledge, and we have to be able to come up with these unnecessary insufficient conditions and

[01:00:15] maybe that's one of the more absurd examples but you find that all the way through analytic philosophy especially in like the 20th century. The truth that you get from raw experience or pure experience isn't very useful. Like it's not very practical. Right. It depends like

[01:00:37] what you mean by practical. That's a good... I think he believes that it is an accurate but also morally better way of understanding the world and weirdly intellectually honest way of approaching reality. Yeah, I don't know if like you're going to need concepts if you're going to

[01:00:59] try to build the atom bomb. Right. You need abstraction. And there's an arrogance I think that like the reification of concepts as like discovery of ultimate truth is arrogant and potentially like lead to downfall. You know it's interesting he uses as an example in here

[01:01:23] the concepts of space and time he says. See, conceptually they're separate. But in reality, like but in practice they're not. But you know now conceptually we have the space-time right? Like from Einstein and it is kind of true that if you got stuck

[01:01:45] on saying that it was a logical truth that space and time were independent of each other, you might not let the math take you where Einstein let the math take him and conclude that something that's wildly counterintuitive that space and time are the same thing.

[01:02:01] Yeah, but James would say Einstein is a conceptual advance over what came before it because of its predictive and explanatory virtues, but it is still relying on like these discrete concepts when everything actually is completely fluid. You could probably get closer and closer to reality

[01:02:29] through an improvement of concepts but you'll never be able to reach it because that's your method of approaching it. And I think like again maybe I'm wrong, but I think most sensible say scientists believe that that they're just getting a bit closer and a bit more accurate

[01:02:51] but not that they're touching ultimate reality. The difference is simply that they would say yeah, but like we're not going to get any closer to reality by just like a blow to the head or whatever. They would think that like the ultimate reality maybe is so independent

[01:03:05] of the human mind. I think you're right. He's on dangerous ground if he's saying that through our concepts we're getting better at describing reality. I think he just thinks there are better and worse ways of using concepts, more or less distorting ways of using concepts but you're already

[01:03:25] taking a step into something that can't succeed if you do that. I like to believe that what he means by intellectualism is that deep belief that the concepts are yielding reality. That arrogance to think that the concepts that we've come up with are connecting us to deeper

[01:03:47] reality. I have to read this quote. The only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality oneself or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining someone else's inner life. But what we thus

[01:04:01] immediately experience or concretely divine is very limited in duration whereas abstractly we're able to conceive eternities. As much as you might question why he trusts our sense experience, definitely could ask why he trusts imagining somebody else's subjective experience. That was weird.

[01:04:19] You could look at this, which I do, as also just a corrective because there's definitely ways that philosophers and scientists do mistake the model for the real, do mistake the map for the territory and that that gets them into a lot of different fundamentally misguided ways of approaching

[01:04:41] the subject, the phenomena. That does happen and when that happens often it's because we've made this mistake and we're just not paying attention enough to the raw experience. We've strayed away from that so that we can control and organize and

[01:05:01] systematize what it is that we're trying to do. Yeah, so probably the way like this is probably too weak for what James wants to say, but maybe experiencing the raw experience trying to get to that mode of like not categorizing, not abstracting, not conceptualizing

[01:05:23] is just a good reminder that reality is independent of our concepts. If you got to the point where you thought that thinking that all of these concepts were actually getting you in touch with reality. This will remind you that these are tools and these

[01:05:39] are ways, but I do think he's like you said, he's making a slightly stronger claim. I'll quote this here talking about Berks and he says, he thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrine absolutely. Instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder, he calls it the more

[01:05:57] superficial. Instead of it being the only adequate knowledge, it is grossly inadequate and its only superiority is the practical one of enabling us to make shortcuts through experience and thereby to save time. The one thing it cannot do is reveal the nature of things, dive back into

[01:06:15] the flux itself, Berkson tells us. If you wish to know reality that flux which Platonism in its strange belief that only the immutable is excellent has always spurned. So yes, it's a rejection of Platonism or what he calls Platonism, but it's also that it's only giving us practical.

[01:06:35] That's the stronger claim. It's not getting ever so close to the wall, it's moving away from the wall but maybe has other practical uses. It does make me wonder how this like whether his pragmatic theory of truth and this are consistent

[01:06:53] with each other or whether this was like a step toward a different view of what truth is. I do think it is a step away from it or it's saying the pragmatism is subordinate to this whereas I think before maybe in

[01:07:09] the will to believe or something like that the reality was defined by the practical and here it's like no, good pragmatic use of concepts can orient you in such a way that you'll be in a position to actually achieve some kind of real enlightened understanding of

[01:07:29] the nature of reality. But it's that does exist apart from the practical. In fact the practical should be guided towards getting us to this thing that transcends it. So I think it's actually in some ways It's transcendentalist. Yeah, it's transcendentalist. But not in the Kantian annoying way.

[01:07:53] No, but you know he has, it's like the nicest I've heard somebody be to Kant in a while like when he says like at least Kant had the decency to place ultimate reality before experience not like these other fucks. And not pretend. Again, he says Plato

[01:08:09] is that. It's interesting like a quick sidebar and then maybe we should wrap up but Plato's actual views on like philosophy being this constant thing of two people, you know it's not something you read in a book and learn. It's something that you actually have to do.

[01:08:27] It's very much I think in line with the Birkson view that this is a constantly evolving organic process. Plato is often put in contrast to process philosophy which is, but I think Plato is like a great example at least the Plato that I like to imagine

[01:08:45] of someone who actually believes that the truth is evolving through these conversations that are continual and that's the philosophical life is never resting with thinking that you've like arrived at something but just to be having the conversation. So, yeah. I think that's a fascinating aspect of Plato.

[01:09:09] Yeah, it's true. Like Plato does get sort of attributed a lot of the the... Platonism. Oh yeah, I was trying to think of any other word. Yeah, I mean there was a book that I was reading not too long ago about like the emergence of

[01:09:27] science and the enlightenment and they were saying like yeah, it was actually a platonic problem that people were unwilling to think of the world as moving. Like things that were moving were imperfect and how could like God have created this perfect world and put

[01:09:41] it in motion? You know, like that was anathema to... To the enlightenment people but actually maybe Plato was, at least his view of philosophy was that it never stops. It's always evolving and progressing and when it stops that's when it's dead.

[01:09:59] So, like I think there's a lot of consonants there with the James Bergson view even though he really is associated with and probably responsible for in a maybe unintended way kind of the opposite trajectory in philosophy. I can already see it now. New from

[01:10:19] Oxford University Press, Tambor Summers Why Plato is misunderstood. Why Plato is an anti-Platonist. Has anyone written that? I don't know. I call it. Dibs. Except that I don't want to have to read Greek. Hell yeah, it's true. Alright. Any other favorite quotes? Let me see what I have.

[01:10:51] The thickness one was my favorite. Thought that deals thus only with surfaces. It can name the thickness of reality but it cannot fathom it. Its insufficiency here is essential and permanent not temporary. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that kind of sums it up right there.

[01:11:11] It's like your science is thin. There are more things in, what is the Shakespeare quote? In heaven and earth than your concepts allow you to believe. Also relevantly it's not the size of the boat, it's the motion of the ocean. It's the thickness of the reality.

[01:11:31] The thickness of reality. Also Shakespeare I think. I think you have a mystical side too. I've always thought that. Yeah. And it's the tragedy of your experience that those two things are always fighting each other. Also that I'm not willing to take hallucinogens

[01:11:51] to get to the pure experience. I'm definitely going to need a blow to the head. A semi-coma. It's so much more fun to just do the mushroom. Alright. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:12:45] I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.