Episode 290: Blinded by the Light (Plato's Cave Pt. 2)

[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] I guess God has a plan for all of us. God's a kid with an aunt farm lady. He's not planning anything. The Queen has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! I'm a very good man. Good.

[00:00:54] 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.

[00:01:20] Dave, you and all the other white men out there got your wish. Joe Biden has pulled out of his re-election campaign and Kamala Harris looks to be the nominee. Are you coconut-pilled yet? That sounds so racist. Weirdly it's not.

[00:01:39] Or if it is, like, you're allowed to be racist. Yeah, right. First of all, I'm Dr. David Pizarro from Cornell University. You say that once a year. Yeah, I've been feeling threatened so I need to let people know that I'm a doctor. That's right.

[00:02:00] Okay, so really the only thing I have to say is there's a weird amount of optimism amongst Democrats that I haven't sensed. Like, I haven't felt that vibe in a really long time.

[00:02:12] Well, yeah. But they've had a vampire or walking corpse, one of the two as their candidate. So, of course. I'd say the last time there was this optimism was literally the day that Biden defeated Trump. People were celebrating.

[00:02:28] You're using some voodoo shit on me because we're going to be talking about death, anxiety, and this is another politics discussion. I feel like the last month and a half, what are you trying to do? How have you snuck this in?

[00:02:41] The next month is just going to be hip-hop and comic books. I can make up for it. Once you were willing to do stalker, it was all over for you. You became the alpha. I don't even make eye contact with you anymore.

[00:02:58] You're right. I'll move on from politics except for one thing because it relates to the death anxiety. What was it, like a week ago that Donald Trump was almost shot? Literally missed by a couple inches, just being shot in the head on live TV. Insane.

[00:03:17] It's like it never happened. It barely registers right now. It's over, 48 hours and now it's just over. I would be pissed if I was Donald Trump. The guy that did it was some 20-year-old from some Pennsylvania town that was never on social media and didn't do it.

[00:03:39] That's the craziest part of it all. Still nobody's talking about it though. They'd rather talk about coconuts. I think the Democrats pulled off a masterstroke, accidentally, I'm sure. In any case, it is crazy. The Hock-Toi girl got more press than... It lasted longer. It's just not good.

[00:04:05] It is the imperfect material world, the copies of the copies. Copies of the copies. We are going to talk more about Plato's cave and the forms and the Republic, books six and seven.

[00:04:19] We're going to get into some more general thoughts, some connections with mysticism, different kinds of mystical traditions. What the fuck dialectic is, all of that in the second segment. But first, social psychology in the 2000s. This is such an unfair drive-by for mid-2000s social psychology.

[00:04:45] I wanted to do this now because I think denial of death is fresh in our regular listeners' head. We certainly had some questions about what the denial of death and the repression of death amounted to.

[00:05:01] What it even meant and what reason we had to believe that that is what drives our cultural commitments and all of that. And our desire to be causa sui. That's part of the issue with the psychoanalytic tradition that that comes out of.

[00:05:17] It's a little hard to know what counts as evidence for and what counts as evidence against. And how you would even go about testing it. Then comes terror management theory and social psychology. And allegedly empirical testing of the denial of death theory.

[00:05:37] And this paper is kind of a late addition to that research? A later addition to that research? It's been going on for about 30 years, I think. Maybe a little more. I don't remember when the original one was, but it was certainly early 90s when it started.

[00:05:55] As background, it was started by three guys who read Denial of Death and had a huge heart on for it. One of them was at Swarthmore or something, right? Yeah, that's right. Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pazinski.

[00:06:07] And the story is, anybody who knows them can correct me if I'm wrong, but this was always the story. The story was that they got really high one day together and they were like, dude, we should do studies on this shit. And so they started doing it.

[00:06:18] And there's been a lot of work, right? Like just a ton of studies now, given what happened to social psychology. I think it's largely believed that a lot of these effects were, they're false positives as a result of p-hacking.

[00:06:33] And we could talk a little bit about some attempts at replication, but that's not the point that you want to make. Not at all. You want to talk conceptually about like how they're even...

[00:06:42] And I like what you were saying because exactly this is exactly what the challenge was. As Becker himself said, and what you were alluding to, the psychoanalytic tradition that claims that there is this big, unknown, unobservable sort of entity of the unconscious and unconscious motivation.

[00:06:57] Like how could you ever prove that it's true? It has to be all indirect. But the way that terror management theory really has tried, they've tried these indirect measures of what is supposedly an unconscious motivation. And like this paper exemplifies some clever, but perhaps not.

[00:07:14] Yeah, for me, the issues here, like forget about the p-hacking. Forget about the fact that it's like 28 psychology undergrads from the University of Albert. No, it's like the measures, the constructs and the underlying theory, right?

[00:07:31] Like, and the idea that you can take something like the denial and the repression of death and break it down into these discrete psychological, like quantifiable, like made up attributes. Like, it just seems crazy to me. So we should say that the paper that inspired this is called,

[00:07:46] Is Death Really the Worm at the Core? Converging Evidence that Worldview Threat Increases Death Thought Accessibility. By Jeff Schimel, Joseph Hayes, Todd Williams and Jesse Jareg.

[00:07:57] So I want to just read the opening of this because I think you can already get like a couple questions I have about just the whole theoretic framework that is being posited here.

[00:08:08] So they say, following William James and a host of other existential thinkers, Becker, Brown, Rank, Otto Rank. So there we go. Good to see Otto Rank. Getting a little citation there. Zillborg, Terror Management Theory. And here they mentioned Solomon Greenberg and like Pazinski.

[00:08:29] Oh yeah, 91. So yeah, first paper. Yeah, that guy, he has one vowel in his name. Like it's like 12 letters. Why is there actually his vowels, Tamler? I guess. That's what they want to pretend is going on, you know.

[00:08:43] So they posit that the entire growing up process, listen to this, just like posit. The entire growing up process, which includes the giving over of one's life to cultural values, causes and ideals and the pursuit and personal sense of significance,

[00:09:00] is essentially masking over one's fears and anxieties about death. Again, like it's really unclear what that sentence even means, right?

[00:09:11] Like what it means for this entire growing up process and all of our values and the giving over of our life to ideals and principles is just essentially masking our fear. If you tried to say, what do you mean by that?

[00:09:26] Like what do you think they would say? I think they would just say like, they're trying to capture, I think in their own words, that grandiose thing that Becker was saying, which is that like fundamentally it all boils down to this.

[00:09:37] Exactly. And we had similar questions at this point about Becker. Like what does that exactly mean? You know, like that's the problem with things about repression is like you don't exactly know exactly how to understand.

[00:09:49] Can't I just sometimes want to eat an ice cream? Like does that have to be about death? Or like publish a book or have sex or whatever. Well, their explanation of it is, in other words, death is the worm at the core of human pretensions to happiness.

[00:10:05] So, okay, this is what I wanted to ask you about. They say if this proposition, which is again, it's not clear what the proposition even means, but if this proposition is correct, then reminders of death should intensify people's investment in cultural prescriptions for happiness. Yeah.

[00:10:24] So, is it just that inference there? Like I have a lot of questions about that. That is at the heart of terror management theory because terror management theory isn't just about taking Becker's ideas and testing them. It is trying to make a very specific claim.

[00:10:42] And Becker does say that we're symbolic creatures and we're adding to culture and culture is being like existing past our own death. So, it feels like we're contributing to something greater than us and maybe even defending ourselves feigning immortality by participating in culture.

[00:10:59] It's a terror management theory has always made this claim that if that's the case, when I remind you of death, that should make you extra insecure in some deep way and you embrace cultural stuff more. That just doesn't seem to follow for me at all. Not at all.

[00:11:17] I think that's the theoretical aspect of it. That's a crazy hypothesis to draw from, even if we understood what was being said. I know, we read it pretty carefully. Like, I totally agree.

[00:11:30] I mean, it is a hypothesis, but it's also so vague. What does it mean to embrace your culture? We often talk about p-hacking by like, oh, eliminating certain participants or outliers.

[00:11:44] But one big way of p-hacking is that a vague hypothesis allows you to measure it in a gajillion ways that seem plausible. Like, oh, is favoring your language over a foreign language? Is that embracing your culture? Or what about like when I show you an American flag?

[00:12:02] There's so many ways in which you can interpret it and they have. They have interpreted it in all those ways. So there's the question of measurement. And we haven't even gotten to like the death thought accessibility measure or the mortality salience hypothesis and the measure for that.

[00:12:19] But even just so, like, as I understand, like how this is supposed to work is your theory should generate the hypothesis. The underlying goal is to provide support from the theory.

[00:12:30] So if you just get a hypothesis that's completely disconnected from the theory and show that it can pass some tests that you engineered, even if it wasn't p-hacked and even if it wasn't like the measures were all fucked up,

[00:12:46] it still wouldn't provide support for the theory unless there's some clear path from the theory to the hypothesis. And here's what I don't think is there. Is that clear link or really link? Like nobody, however you interpret Becker's view.

[00:13:01] It's not that this thing works like a little like clockwork in your head. It's like, oh, oh no, death. I got to embrace culture. I think it's not that. He doesn't mean that. No.

[00:13:14] And I feel like that would be clear if you were talking about Freud, that it couldn't be that simple. So Becker is straight up offering a psychoanalytic position of like deep, deep repression and motivation. By simply replacing what Freud said was sex with death.

[00:13:32] And I think it would be pretty obvious if anybody tried to do, if they were like, hey, can I increase penis accessibility thoughts when I make you feel bad about yourself because like your, your whatever it is shining through like that.

[00:13:48] You would say like, well, not Freud would never think that like Freud. If there's any hint that this stuff comes out, it's completely masked by like slips of the tongue and like dreams or whatever.

[00:13:59] Like there's not, you can't just like poke somebody and see like penis come out. Again, it's just like a mismapping of like what it is that you're supposedly trying to test. Right.

[00:14:12] So now there's a couple of things though that you could, that could be making you extra annoyed by this. Cause I agree totally with you that this psychoanalytic theory does not, does not predict that.

[00:14:22] Like, and it seems like a very, like such a stretch, but those measures of thought accessibility are reliable measures. So like, you know, there's like this classic demonstration of, I give you a list of a bunch of words that like dream, pillow, nighttime, bed.

[00:14:39] I give you that list and like, I tell you, I'm going to test you on those words to see if you remember them. So like five minutes later, I give you a list of words and I ask you was sleep on that list?

[00:14:51] A lot of people say yes, like probably most people. And that's just because you've made accessible a concept without ever naming it.

[00:14:59] So like you can use measures, like they're, they're borrowing these reliable measures of like just, you know, conceptual similarity and like the way that the mind works in this like network of semantic associations. You can cognitively prime people reliably and see that that works.

[00:15:15] It's like, if you give me G R blank, you know, something E if I do it with grave instead of grope or something like that, or grape, then you said that, that like my death thought is more accessible.

[00:15:31] Yeah. So it's not hard to say that like, if I showed you a video of fruits, like a basket of apples, and then like five minutes later, I'm like, okay. I give you GR blank, whatever, whatever that you're more likely to say grape than grope.

[00:15:46] Right. Yeah. That's like a reliable finding in cognitive psychology. Like that's just sort of network. It's cognitive priming. Also, you're more likely to recognize words that are flashed quickly as words versus non words if they're related to the concepts you're already thinking of.

[00:16:01] So that's, yeah, that's the unconscious as modern cognitive psychology has defined it. It's not the motivational unconscious. It's like a really, like a really simple thing.

[00:16:12] It's just saying like, if I make you think about fruits, of course, thinking about grapes is going to be easier than thinking about groups.

[00:16:17] They're taking that and like porting it over to be like some sort of measure of the deep unconscious that like Freud and Becker want to talk about, which I think is, it's an accident that we use those two words. The unconscious. Yeah.

[00:16:30] Yeah. That's just not what cognitive psychologists ever were thinking they were studying. If you can so easily make it accessible, like all of Freud's shit is just like trivial.

[00:16:41] Like he thought you needed five years of therapy to like even realize that like maybe you loved your mom and wanted to kill your dad. You know? Yeah. You get 28 students in Alberta to like fill out a survey. And like that part is unbelievable.

[00:16:57] But there's so many layers of the problems here that I think are illustrative of like that kind of lunacy that I sometimes see. So like getting to the measures that you're talking about here.

[00:17:07] So the structure of this paper, as I understand it, is all the literature so far, a lot of the literature has been to test what's called the mortality salience hypothesis, which is if you remind people of death, they're going to be like, I need culture.

[00:17:23] I need culture. I need culture. Again, just a crazy hypothesis to have. So now you need measures for A, you know, like how much are you thinking about death and how much can we manipulate that? And then B, how like desirous of culture are you?

[00:17:41] That's the mortality salience hypothesis. But they say... Can I just give you an example of like the kinds of studies that were done? So, you know, I don't remember what this is from.

[00:17:53] I assume it was published, but they would try to remind you of death, but like not be over the top, not be like, oh, you're going to die. You're going to die. Like it had to be subtle. Right?

[00:18:02] So if I had you filling out a survey about your cultural beliefs in front of the entrance to a cemetery versus not. And the control condition would always be like, OK, well, we don't want it to just be that we're making people anxious. So we need something else.

[00:18:20] So one condition they'd have somebody. So in another manipulation, have somebody write about like the, you know, what happens when you're about to die? Like, how would you feel like it's going to happen to your body?

[00:18:29] And then the other condition would be like, well, we need something that makes them anxious, but not about death. That would be the proper control condition. So they write about dental pain.

[00:18:38] So like they would be like, write a few paragraphs about like waiting at the dentist and like whether or not you're going to like feel pain at the dentist. And so there see they're controlling for anxiety and showing that it's pure death anxiety.

[00:18:51] This is like you don't get to make fun of Jordan Peterson if you've been doing this shit. Like this is just as woo woo as that. But in defense of I don't rambling about this, but this was like an important part of my life for like a decade.

[00:19:07] So a lot of social psychologists knew that this was bullshit or already believed it. I remember being a young graduate student and finding this stuff and being like, oh, this is cool. We should talk about it in Journal Club.

[00:19:19] So like it was my turn to pick a paper. I pick it in Journal Club. And Mazarin Banaji, who's a well-known social psychologist at the time, was just mean to me about it. She was just like, I can't believe you picked this like bullshit.

[00:19:31] And I was like, no, but it's like they look, they did the studies. And she was an editor at a very, very top journal. And she said, as long as I'm editor, no terror management theory paper will ever get published in this journal.

[00:19:45] And I was like, oh man, that's so anti-science. That's so anti-science. Okay, can we just go into these a little bit? So even though up till this point, most of the literature is focused on the mortality salience hypothesis.

[00:20:03] Weirdly, almost no research has focused on another of terror management theory's basic propositions. The death thought accessibility hypothesis, DTA. This is definitely, this reminds me of also like analytic philosophy, like an experimental philosophy. Like everything just gets like these little three letter.

[00:20:23] I did this, so I'm no better. Down to a DTA. This hypothesis is essentially the converse. It's just the converse. It is the converse. Now I'm being bitchy. The converse of the mortality salience hypothesis. And states that if a psychological structure, e.g. the cultural world view.

[00:20:48] Just for example, the cultural world view. Buffers people from thoughts about death. Then weakening this psychological structure should momentarily bring thoughts about death closer to awareness. The purpose of the current research was to test this hypothesis. So literally just, again, the converse essentially of that.

[00:21:10] Which is that if you remind people, or sorry, if you attack their culture. Then they should think about death more momentarily. Because that's a clear hypothesis from terror management theory. And there is Becker and Otto Rank and Freud and Brown and William James.

[00:21:29] It's social psychology by Modus Tollens. Like it's happened so often where they're like, well, if A then B, therefore B then A. And it's like, wait, what? No, none of this follows from the theory. But even if the first one followed, like the converse wouldn't also follow.

[00:21:47] It's just fucking unbelievable. So now they give the research. And it's just, I don't know, like we don't need to get this into the weeds of it. But just to give an example of this. They gave... Anti-Canada webpage? The anti-Canada webpage. So they gave 63.

[00:22:09] So this was one of the high powered studies that they did. Students. Again, this isn't the problem. And it would be a red herring to say that this was a problem. But they gave them something that attacked Canada culture and something that attacked Australian culture.

[00:22:23] And then, you know, that's the way they were going to attack the key groups cultural worldview. Is by reading a passage from a website that's called Poo on You Canucks. And the essay began with the title Down with Canada.

[00:22:42] And an opening line that read, everyone hates Canada and here are a few reasons than I do. And so then just attacked like the health care thing. And so the hypothesis is that if you read that instead of someone making fun of Australians and you're a Canadian,

[00:22:59] you will immediately fill more words out in the death way than other ways. Like in the next task. So like COFF complete that word with two letters. Did you complete it coffin or did you complete it with coffee? Yeah, exactly.

[00:23:15] And that the reason is because of terror, like because of the denial of death. Like that's cuckoo. That's that. That is cuckoo. It's cuckoo. And it could like you're saying, OK, so one, it doesn't follow logically for sure from the theory.

[00:23:31] I don't think it follows in any way. Like it's not even something that I would think, oh, this might be true if that's right. It might it might be empirically true, but it would be hard to see what that mechanism is.

[00:23:41] Like, I guess like I can see that you might get sucked into the logic that if culture is a buffer and I remove a buffer, then presumably the thing that it's buffering is going to like rear its head. Right. So like that's the reasoning.

[00:23:55] So like if they did this with 500 people like pre-registered it and they found that people in one condition actually did reply more like they're more likely to complete words with death. I think the question would still be why the fuck does terror management theory predict this?

[00:24:12] Like I don't like I don't think it does. And it would be like I don't think this is a measure of anything deep in the unconscious.

[00:24:18] But like it's perfectly fine to think that like if I make you think of a concept, that concept is going to be more accessible. OK, true. But that is certainly not what they're trying to do. Right. Yeah. That's what I'm saying.

[00:24:34] And they ported it over to mean this thing and that gets completely loses validity. Right.

[00:24:40] The other issue is reading poo on Canucks would make would affect your cultural worldview to the extent that it would, you know, make you think about death unconsciously more is also like just, you know, that measure. It's like how like how shaken is your cultural worldview, I guess?

[00:25:02] Yeah. And I like not like it's like that. They're like socialized medicine is kind of bad because you have to pay for it anyway. And you have long waits. And you're like, oh, my God, I'm going to die. Exactly.

[00:25:15] Also, by the way, you just made me think like I don't know. I didn't read the paper carefully enough to know if they talk about it. But if you get people to think about health care and then show that they're thinking about death. Well, like, duh. Right.

[00:25:29] Like that's like. I forget because the Australian one, does that talk about health care at all? I don't know. No, I don't think you're right. No. Again, like I feel like you're running a little false flag. I'm just saying that could explain some results. It's true.

[00:25:48] Oh, my God. Yeah. And I just love like, I don't know, you're going to post this. Right. I would or I don't want to go through them. But like they did five studies and each study.

[00:26:00] The motivation for it is trying to come up with rule out alternate explanations for the last study that, you know, like on 30 people. And yeah. So like it's just very funny that like the way this builds up and how convoluted the

[00:26:17] like alternate explanations that they come up with. Given that four studies presented above were conducted on the same population of participants. The generalizability of our findings was somewhat limited. We therefore conducted one. Somewhat limited. But they took care of it.

[00:26:34] This is completely unfair to these authors like this. We were all I mean, it's fair in one sense, but it's that they are. You could do this on like mid 2000s version. Yeah. Doesn't mean we weren't wrong. And also not fully. You could.

[00:26:53] Accordingly, we recruited two groups of participants who held opposing worldviews and subjected them to materials that would be threatening to only one group's worldview. So they got procreation and pro evolution people, but they were still University of Alberta students. How is that like? This was our top journal.

[00:27:16] This is your top journal? Oh my God. I didn't even look at the journal. What is it? This journal on personal and social psychology. Oh wow. Can I just read one example of this? Yeah. It says study one demonstrated the predicted increase in death thought accessibility following

[00:27:35] a potent worldview threat. Poo on Canucks is the potent worldview threat. There are a few alternative ways of accounting for the results. First, the lack of a completely neutral control condition hinders our ability to conclude that the anti Canada threat actually increased DTA relative to normal levels.

[00:27:54] It could be that the anti Australia threat decreased death thought accessibility and that the anti Canada threat had no effect. For example, it's possible that DTA was naturally high among our participants. That exposure to an essay derogatory like this is like, this is fucking crazy. It's crazy.

[00:28:13] Well, you know, I feel like if you were intellectually humble, Tamler, you might, you might open yourself to the possibility that just like UFOs might exist, death thought accessibility might be increased by Canuck poo on Canuck websites. I feel like you're a complete hypocrite. Poo on Canucks.

[00:28:33] That should be the title, even though it's about Plato's cave. This is okay. There's two reasons why this is good that we did this. One is. I need to get this out of my system every so often. You do need to get it. Yeah.

[00:28:46] And and yeah, it's all a confusing mix of stuff because like I like I get the sentiment that you're bringing to this, which is like, this is so crazy that it seems. But like they're borrowing pieces from actually better kinds of psychology and they're bringing it in.

[00:29:00] And this is the second thing I was going to say. This sets the stage nicely for us to just finally tackle the cargo cult science essay that Feynman's graduation speech that became an essay, which is just like this.

[00:29:12] Like as you're reading like their intro to study for, they're just doing the things that you're supposed to say when you're doing science. Exactly. That's what it seems like. I mean, we've talked about this, but it's like they're in big boy.

[00:29:24] They're grown up close, you know, like doing these things. And it's just like it doesn't fit. Find the method that fits the. Like Aristotle said, look for precision as much as a subject admits. Yeah.

[00:29:38] And this is why I think p-hacking is although it's like this surface critique or whatever or like a very simple critique, it allowed for this kind of thing to run rampant. Right. Anybody could just be like, hmm, I wonder if this. Yeah. And then just go run studies.

[00:29:57] Like if it weren't for that, people wouldn't have felt so like fucking like they were. Right. Because these would have just been like, yeah, yeah. They wouldn't have worked. Like, oh, OK, this is stupid. Let's figure out something else. You wonder why it didn't work?

[00:30:12] And it's funny, like all of the imprecise language that you were picking up on. I remember when I first started hanging around with philosophers and like the way that they would talk about the intros and the discussions of psych papers. I remember being like, why do you care?

[00:30:27] Like we don't care that much about what we say there. Yeah. You know, but they were like essentially like words, words mean things. Right. And like now I'm just on their side.

[00:30:37] Like now I just like I was just editing my students paper and I was like, dude, words mean things. I can't save it. It's just such a fly by night way of writing. Like that beginning where they're like growing up. What? Like what does that mean? Growing up.

[00:30:52] The entire growing up process. Like are you talking about development? Also, yeah, just like the entire growing up process. Like what the fuck does that mean? Like what are you talking about? I know. That's like a term of art, the growing up process.

[00:31:05] The giving over of one's life to cultural values. Like what does that even mean? It means nothing. It means nothing. Like what is what is somebody who doesn't give over their life to cultural values? Like what a hermit? Like what is that? Or just like a hipster.

[00:31:23] It's just it's just so weird. And then I love that they say in other words, death is the worm of the core. Oh, well, that explains it. OK, good. All right. All right. All right. Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

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[00:35:27] A little ornery, not with our listeners, of course, but with each other. That can happen. We spend a lot of time talking, me and David. In any case, those are always fun. I truly enjoy them whether we fight or not.

[00:35:44] Thank you so much to all of you from the bottom of my heart. We appreciate you all so much. Let's get back to the episode. All right, let's get back into our discussion of the famous allegory of the cave, the forms, book six and seven of The Republic.

[00:36:02] I alluded to this kind of motivating objection that philosophers are supposed to rule the city. That was one of the conclusions that was reached earlier in the dialogue, yet the general impression of philosophers is either that they're boring and worthless or that they're corrupt.

[00:36:30] In book six, Adamantus says, no one would be able to contradict the things you said, Socrates, but on each occasion that you say them, your hearers are affected in some way such as this. They think because they're inexperienced in asking and answering questions, they're led

[00:36:47] astray a little bit by the argument at every question and that when these little bits are added together at the end of the discussion, great is their fall as the opposite of what they've said at the outset comes to light.

[00:37:00] He's just taking people and making them contradict themselves, right? Like the very classic Socrates method. Just as inexperienced checkers players are trapped by the experts in the end and can't make a move, so they too are trapped in the end and have nothing to say in this different

[00:37:16] kinds of checkers which is played not with dicks. Freud might have some words. That's a measure. That's a measure of excessive anger. Not just with, it's played not with dicks. Wait, what? What's going on? Those Kamala memes are getting to you. Not with discs but with words. Yeah.

[00:37:48] Also not with dicks. Yet the truth isn't affected by this outcome, the fact that somebody is blocked. That doesn't affect the truth just because somebody is a better debater. This is actually like a good point against like a debate me guy which Socrates was.

[00:38:03] Like, okay, yeah, fine, you can like trick me into contradicting myself but that doesn't mean that like that's the truth. It just means you got me to contradict. You're a good manipulator. Yeah, you're a good manipulator.

[00:38:14] I say this with view to the present case for someone might well say now that he's unable to oppose you as you ask each of your questions yet he sees that all of those who take up philosophy,

[00:38:26] not those who merely dabble in it while still young in order to complete their upbringing. That's a very funny thing that a lot of people say about philosophy and Plato's dialogue that it's something you do while you're young, you know, like, you know, it's like your carowak

[00:38:39] phase or something. But those who continue in it for a longer time, the greatest numbers become cranks, not to say completely vicious while those who seem completely decent are rendered useless to the city because of the studies you recommend.

[00:38:54] Do you think these people are lying when they say that about philosophers? And he says, I don't know. And he says, I think that it's true. So then Adamantus says, well, how can you say then that the only way to save a real city

[00:39:07] is to have philosophers rule them given that this is what people say about them and it's true? This is his answer. It's this image of the ship owner and navigator. He says, like, imagine there's this ship that's owned by a rich but like kind of deaf ship owner.

[00:39:32] And he has a bunch of sailors jockeying for power. They want to be captain of the ship. So essentially like rulers of the city. Right. And they're trying to persuade the ship owner to let them be the captain.

[00:39:46] But they know nothing about the art of piloting the ship. And they don't even think that such an art is possible. They're devoting all of their energies to persuading the captain that they're the best person for the job. But they don't know about actually piloting a ship.

[00:40:00] They're not navigators. What they're good at is persuading somebody that they are the person to guide the ship. Right. Okay. So that's like almost everybody trying to jockey for captain. But meanwhile, there's this one guy and he's just looking at the stars and writing things

[00:40:17] down and he's charting their movements and not getting involved in all the dramas and political jockeying that's going on around him. And so what are people going to say about this person? Well, that he's useless. He's worthless. That he has his head in the clouds.

[00:40:34] That he's not a real person. He's not a serious person. But meanwhile, so like a true pilot of the ship, you have to pay careful attention to the year, the seasons, heavens, stars, winds, and everything that's proper to the art.

[00:40:50] If you're really going to be skilled at ruling a ship, like you have to know everything about how a ship works and also like how navigation works and where you're going. So he says, this is a quote, so with such things happening on the ships, don't you believe

[00:41:04] that the true pilot will be called the stargazers, a prater, and a useless to them by those who sail on ships run by this? And they say, yeah, they would laugh at him. The sailors would laugh at him and denounce him.

[00:41:17] But he is actually the true pilot, right? He's actually the best person to guide the ship, but he doesn't have interest in doing that. Right? Like he has no interest in like getting involved in all the politics of the ship. He just wants to like understand navigation. Right?

[00:41:35] He's devoted to that. And when you have to do all this other bullshit, lobbying and like getting donors and like convincing people and making speeches, that shows no interest to him. And it's precisely because of that, that he's the most proper person, that he's devoted

[00:41:54] to the art of navigation, not the art of jockeying for political power. And that's what the philosophy, philosopher is like in the modern city. This is important. Right? It's not his fault that everyone perceives him as useless.

[00:42:10] He is useless, but it's because of the conditions of the city that the philosopher is useless. Right? A true philosopher, given cities as they are, and this definitely applies to our society too, they won't be like you can expect them not to be recognized, not to be nurtured,

[00:42:31] and also maybe to be attacked and for people to feel threatened by them. And look, if you're like that, this is so interesting I think. Like he says, if you're a true sailor and all of a sudden everyone's attacking you

[00:42:46] and you're not doing well and you haven't developed the virtues to be a pure philosopher, then you're just going to start using your philosophical skills, your intelligence for bad purposes. You're going to be like, okay, fine.

[00:42:59] If this is what they fucking want, they want me to like out maneuver this other captain, then I will be- Start talking about Mont and Bailey fallacies. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, right? And they're just like, fuck it.

[00:43:12] I'll just start a sub stack essentially and start convincing people that the woke mind virus is why my son is trans. So like he wants to show why philosophers are only suited to rule.

[00:43:27] This is a long point I'm making, that they're the only ones suited to rule, but he wants to square that with not only what everyone thinks about philosophers, but how most philosophers actually are in the modern city and still say that there's this path, there's this way

[00:43:45] that the true philosopher can go. And one of the things we can talk about at the end of this is it's an open question whether that true philosopher can survive in any kind of city as somebody that is part of the political

[00:44:01] machinery of it rather than somebody who is off to the side and made fun of. That's good. I mean, it's self-serving in this way that like, you know, so like what do you think though?

[00:44:12] Like the metaphor is a cool one and a powerful one, but it does mix up two things. Like one is knowing the truth and the other one is leading. Yeah. And I'm not convinced that those things overlap that much unfortunately. Well, so that's a great point.

[00:44:29] I think if you're right, then what Plato is actually pointing out, which some people think is the incompatibility of philosophy and politics. And this is a great example of it, right? Like this navigator who's just writing stuff down in his little journal is not galvanizing anybody.

[00:44:49] And meanwhile, all these other people presumably are. They have their little factions of people. Maybe this is why conditions being what they are, the philosopher can never gain any traction. And maybe what Plato is saying by pushing like, okay, but the way we can get this to

[00:45:06] actually work is if we kill everybody over the age of 10 and we have sex lotteries that are rigged and women in the army and like all this stuff, that's the way we would do it. And it's a reductio ad absurdum.

[00:45:19] Like this is what it would take to get philosophers to be accepted as rulers. Even just killing everybody over the age of 10. Does he really say that? Or yeah, you take them away and essentially like abandon them somewhere. Yeah.

[00:45:35] And probably kill them and then just start because they're too, it's actually irrelevant to the cave. They've had too much exposure to the shadows. They're not going to buy the noble lie, which we haven't talked about, but we could talk about later. Yeah.

[00:45:49] So like what you're saying, I think might be that Plato is doing a reductio ad absurdum of this idea or it could be that it's self-serving and he really thinks like we got to do this. It's so hard to tell. Like I can't. It's incredible. Yeah.

[00:46:04] And there's like equal numbers of people on sides of that too. It's like not a settled question. Yeah. It's insane. I was doing just a bit of researching for this episode and the amount of disagreement.

[00:46:15] It's so funny to you just like depending on how you're reading it in your head, it like sounds like a very different. It's a very different thing. Like you could run and I believed this at one point, like I think wrongly, like I just wasn't sophisticated enough.

[00:46:30] Oh yeah. He's trying to build a totalitarian, like he's laying the blueprint for a totalitarian regime with eugenics and all of that. And it's because he could never got over Socrates' death, which I think is true. And he blamed democracy for that, which I also think is true.

[00:46:49] But the idea that this is really what he thought was the way out of it. Like I don't buy. I'm not on that side anymore. That's so interesting. I just never had thought about this. Like, but yeah, I'm totally convinced. I think that's such a plausible way.

[00:47:05] Like I was just the way that you're saying, which is a reductio, like maybe like he was so disillusioned by the way things were going that I also think like, and this is what I

[00:47:14] want to ask you, like philosophy seems to just be so like different in scope now that the kind of philosopher who's searching for this kind of truth, it just doesn't seem like those are the philosophers that we produce for better or for worse. Definitely not.

[00:47:34] This is something we've talked about like ad nauseum, but you're studying a small problem of a small problem. You're not tackling metaphysics and ethics and epistemology and like the truth. Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

[00:47:49] In some ways it's a little like the difference between Freud and like the people we did in the first segment. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like one's like explaining the entirety of human culture and the other one's like using word completion.

[00:48:06] Speaking of parallels, like we went through the cave, but I don't think we fully mapped. Do you want to try to map the cave metaphor onto reality? Yeah. So from my, like again, my limited reading about this, I saw that there are very different

[00:48:23] interpretations of what this allegory is supposed to be, what the work that it's doing is. So just like to start off, do you have an interpretation that you favor? So let me just give you like off the top of my head what I think the, yeah, like what

[00:48:39] things map onto. So obviously the shadows on the wall because they're shadows of an artifact are problematic because it's like we're not always looking in mirrors and we're not always reading plays and looking at paintings.

[00:48:56] So why are we seeing copies of copies always if we're prisoners in the cave? Right. I think that's because we are always bringing our perspective visually since we're talking about the visible world, right? The sensible world.

[00:49:13] So we're always bringing our perspective, our sense of smell, our sense of sight, our sense of like where we are in relation to the object that we're seeing. That's my interpretation for the shadows.

[00:49:24] So like there's the visible tree and then there's me looking at the tree, which is not, I think I said this last episode. Is it really that different than me looking at a painting of a tree?

[00:49:34] Yeah, of course it's different, but they're both like a level down from the tree itself viewed objectively, I guess. Like I don't even know what that exactly means in the visible world, but viewed objectively there's the tree and then there's everybody like this makes sense, like perspective of

[00:49:51] the tree or like description of the tree or painting of the tree or whatever. Yeah. Then there's the artifacts themselves that are being held in front of the fire. The fire I think maps on pretty clearly to what we take to be the sun, right?

[00:50:05] Like and then there's the tree that is being held up. That's the objective tree in the visible world. Definitely not the objective tree. That's the thing that exists. In the visible. In the ground. The thing that causes all of our perceptions.

[00:50:22] Yes, not ultimately causes, but that approximately causes. So like in the cave, the best we can get is a glimpse of the sun and from outside without knowing what the fuck that would be.

[00:50:36] And then we can actually look at the artifacts, the like cardboard cutouts or wood cutouts, the puppets in front of the fire that's casting the shadows. And we can be like, oh, look, I thought that shadow was real, but it's actually this. That's real, but it's actually not.

[00:50:50] It's just a cardboard cutout of the tree, which is like the objectively viewed tree itself in the visible world. Yeah. Then you get out of the cave and remember, you're first blinded by the light. And we'll talk about the mystical elements of that.

[00:51:05] Like you can't really see anything and you have to focus on the shadows outside the cave and also reflections in the water where you see reflections of trees, reflections of the sun even, and reflections of all the various things.

[00:51:19] And you need to take time for your eyes to adjust. And then you get the actual stuff like the tree. Finally, you can look at the tree. Right. What's confusing about it. So in the divided line, once you're out of the visible realm into the intelligible realm,

[00:51:37] there's only two places. There's the place, you know, it seems to be for geometry, axioms that are taken for granted. And then there's the forms. And there's no division necessarily between the sun in the divided line and the rest of the forms.

[00:51:54] In the outside world also, there's three different levels, right? Like there's the sun, which you can also look at and is an object of knowledge. He's explicit about that. And then there's the regular forms that aren't the good. The sun is the good. Right.

[00:52:09] And then there's, you know, the reflections of that. So it seems like there's three different levels that the divided line doesn't account for. But in terms of mapping that on to regular life, this is what I'm having trouble with.

[00:52:21] Like I get that, you know, like the form of the tree when I'm actually looking at it outside the cave, not in a reflection, I'm looking at the form of a tree, the ideal tree. I get that.

[00:52:34] What I don't totally get is what looking at the reflection of the tree outside the cave is. I get that it's supposed to be geometry or any kind of axiomatic system. But what I don't get is like how that is a reflection of a tree.

[00:52:50] Yeah, I don't either. And it's like I'm never quite sure how much of the metaphor is supposed to do work. Like, is he pretty explicit now? I'm forgetting.

[00:52:59] Is it pretty explicit that the shadows of the tree in the outside world are a different category than, like, say, the artifacts in the cave? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's like the other side of the main divider in the dividing line.

[00:53:12] So like the artifacts are in the visible realm and the shadows are in the intelligible realm. So that's only where, like, thought operates. There's no, like, perception. You're not projecting perception onto the world at that point. Yeah.

[00:53:30] I mean, this gets to, like, a core question, which is, is this an allegory about metaphysics? Like, what is that category of thing? Like, I have no good sense. Like, if I'm looking at the reflection of the tree in the outside world. Yeah.

[00:53:45] I mean, here's the best I can do for mapping that onto the world. So you have the form. So I'm going to say that the forms of trees and the form of the good, which is the sun, while they have their relations, that's separate from the reflections.

[00:54:03] You know, like once you're looking at the forms, you're looking at the forms, and that includes the form of the good, right?

[00:54:12] So what I think is that that intermediate step when you're looking at the reflections of the forms and the good, they are approximations of the kinds of thought that you would have to do if you had these, like, unjustified assumptions if they were true. Right?

[00:54:32] Like, this is how you would reason towards the good. This is how you would reason towards the ideal tree. This is how you would reason to the ideal dog, the ideal state, whatever. Right? Like, the just state. Like, this is what you would do in the reflections.

[00:54:50] If you had these baseline principles already established, you're doing the right thing in terms of reasoning your way then to conclusions, like about the truth of the essential nature. But because those core principles, axioms are not justified yet, they're just reflections.

[00:55:14] They're just reflections of what you would do if you had these core assumptions justified. Then when you get to the actual forms, you are doing the same thing, literally the same thing, except that you have somehow through dialectic, which we'll talk about, justified those key, those axioms. Yeah.

[00:55:37] That's the best I can come up with. Yeah.

[00:55:40] I'm just, like, I have trouble wrapping my head around what that step is from, like, if you start with the assumptions, like the axioms of Euclidean geometry and you're working your way to understanding, like, what a triangle is or whatever, you know?

[00:55:53] Like, what are you letting go of when you let go of the axioms and go toward the forms? Like, what exactly is the work that's being done there? That's what I'm just doing.

[00:56:03] That's interesting that you use the term letting go because remember he says we could go to that passage, this first description of the forms. He says, then also understand by the other subsection of the intelligible, I mean that which reason itself grasps by the power of dialectic.

[00:56:22] It does not consider these hypotheses as first principles, but truly as hypotheses, as stepping stones to take off from enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself, keeping hold of what comes.

[00:56:40] So, essentially it's like somehow, and we're going to talk about this I think as we get into the mystical aspects of this, but somehow that same thought process that gets you Euclidean geometry, if you regard them not as axioms but as stepping stones, you actually get the thing that can justify everything.

[00:57:04] And then once you get that, you go back and you're doing the same fucking thing. It's just that you now have an overarching justification for what you're doing, the ultimate foundational justification of what you're doing.

[00:57:18] So, like I'm speaking out of my ass here because of how little I know both about Plato and geometry, but it seems as if that's exactly kind of what happened in geometry where they said, what if we violate Euclidean axioms?

[00:57:32] You get a whole other level of geometry, not like all of non-Euclidean geometry, which in fact took those axioms as mere hypotheses and then just did work without assuming them to be true. And then all these others true, all the other truths opened up.

[00:57:47] But did it double back and then end up confirming? Well, that's where it kind of falls down because obviously I don't think they had non-Euclidean geometry at the time.

[00:57:57] But that's where I'm like, well, maybe a mathematician would say, yeah, what we've learned is that our Euclidean geometry was so bound by the physical that we obscured truths about the spatial relationships when you don't have those Euclidean assumptions.

[00:58:18] And that helps us understand better what it is we're doing when we do Euclidean geometry. Yeah. It seems like that would be a reasonable thing. Yeah, that's reasonable and very Plato-like sympathetic. Oh, we're projecting our imagination onto geometry like the physical world, the empirical world.

[00:58:36] We're kind of assuming that geometry has to be that way and it doesn't, very much in line with what he's arguing. But this idea of it doubling back or in some way justifying itself, that I think is a live issue in philosophy of mathematics.

[00:58:53] Like, is it just a new system of non-Euclidean geometry that still has to rely on some unargued for core assumptions or is it like somehow self-justifying real in the sense that Plato thought the forms were real? Yeah.

[00:59:13] It's interesting because the mathematicians I've talked to seem to sort of abandon that they're describing reality. Yeah. And are just like, no, we're just playing a game of consistency and what falls out when you start with this assumption instead of that assumption.

[00:59:28] But so then they're just playing when the reflections in the lake. Yeah, maybe, right. This is why fundamentally I think like I'm not sure what that process of getting to the forms is. And he repeatedly refers to it as the dialectic.

[00:59:44] It does seem under specified to me what that is, but I also think it's fundamentally mystical and like I can't shake that. Okay, well let's turn to this. So I just read the first thing about dialectic that like again sounds very mystical.

[00:59:59] Well, this is the Plato like dance, right? It sounds mystical, but it also sounds very almost scientific or analytic philosophy. Like, oh, we're just taking these hypotheses as hypothesis. So it's both, right? But I think it becomes more explicitly mystical later in book seven.

[01:00:17] So Glaucon now is saying I need to figure out how to get to this form of the good. Like I need to know like what this path is. This is on page 177. And he says, Then isn't this at last Glaucon the song that dialectic sings?

[01:00:35] It is intelligible, but it is imitated by the power of sight. We said that sight tries at last to look at animals themselves, the stars themselves, and in the end at the sun themselves.

[01:00:47] In the same way, whenever someone tries through argument and apart from all sense perceptions to find the being of each thing and doesn't give up until he grasps the good itself and with understanding itself,

[01:01:03] he reaches the end of the intelligible just as the other reached the end of the visible. Glaucon says absolutely. And what about this journey? Don't you call it dialectic? I do. Then release from bonds and the turning around from shadows to statues in the light of the fire.

[01:01:21] And then the way up out of the cave to sunlight and there the continuing inability to look at animals, the plants in the light of the sun, but the newly acquired ability to look at divine images in water and shadow of the things that are.

[01:01:35] All this business of the crafts we've mentioned before as they have a power to awaken the best part of the soul and lead it upwards. The clearest thing in the body was led to the brightest thing in the bodily and visible realm.

[01:01:47] And then he says, I accept that this is so even though it's very hard to accept in one way and not hard to accept in another. Now let's assume that what you've said is so and turn to the song itself. What is the sort of power dialectic has?

[01:02:01] What forms is it divided into? What paths does it follow? For these lead at last it seems towards the place which is a rest from the road, so to speak, and an end for the journey and for the one who reaches it.

[01:02:14] So then Socrates says, you won't be able to follow me any longer, Glargon, even though there is no lack of eagerness on my part to lead you, for you would no longer be seeing an image of what we're describing but the truth itself. This is important.

[01:02:28] He's distinguishing between what Socrates can do and explaining like how this works from the thing itself. Like you just have to do this. You have to do the dialectic process and then you can see if I'm right, but I can't convince you right now.

[01:02:46] I can just give you an image that makes you think there's a there there. And he says at any rate, that's how it seems to me. This is the thing I wanted to ask you about, that it is really so is not worth insisting on any further,

[01:02:59] but that there is such thing to be seen. That is something we must insist on. Isn't that so? And Glargon says, of course, but why must we insist on that?

[01:03:11] I feel like I could read that in a mystical way or I could read that in a almost pragmatic way where it's the journey rather than the destination that matters here way.

[01:03:26] Yeah, this was interesting to me that it is really so is not worth insisting on any further. He's there sort of like reifying what he just said. It's going to be a waste of time for me to try to convince you by talking

[01:03:38] because like I just said, this kind of talking can't take you to the forum. So I'm taking you as far as I can go. And then when he says that we must insist on that there is something there,

[01:03:50] I kind of read some metaphysics there where he's just like, something has to be causing this stuff. Like it seems so clear that there is something causing this stuff, that like it's just true, like self-evidently true. I think you're right. There has to be something causing this stuff.

[01:04:08] But whether it's self-evidently true or whether it's something that we have to accept methodologically in order to live a philosophic life, I think that's the question, right? Or he might be saying, check your intuition. You know this is true.

[01:04:26] Like we've gotten this far, like really think about this. You know this to be true and this would be consistent with the kind of nativism that he thinks that it's remembering where he might just think it's in you.

[01:04:37] Like all you need to do is really think about it and it's just in you. Right, like nativism and then also the mysticism aspect of that is, yeah. But let me just suggest also because I really do think that's a plausible thing.

[01:04:51] But we have to insist that it's there. Could be like if it's not there, the whole edifice crumbles. We don't know what a good table is, what a good tree is, what a good city is. Everything is fucked. It's like just turn it over to the sophist.

[01:05:05] It's all a power struggle. That could be the case, but if you assume it's not, right? If you assume there is these ideals and there is this essence of all these things, that allows you to lead a philosophic life and get your soul in order.

[01:05:23] So it's a little like Pascal's wager. Even if it turns out not to be true, you will be better off than if you assumed that it was false and it also turned out to be false. So it has the potential for both those interpretations.

[01:05:40] And even what follows where he says, mustn't we also insist that the power of dialectic could reveal it to someone only experienced in the subjects we've described? And of course Glaucon says, yeah, only the dialectic could get us there because he's a yes man.

[01:05:57] But then what Socrates says is no one will dispute it because there's no other inquiry that's even trying to do this, right? So it's not that this is like self-justifying in some way or obviously the right way of doing it.

[01:06:11] It's the only game in town to try to get at the forms. So we have to like spin it as far as it will go and maybe it's right. Like, you know. So is the dialectic just the method of reasoning through something?

[01:06:29] Well, I think it's like – it's funny because in some ways it's this mystical, magical thing and in other ways it's like a standard Socrates thing. What's piety? Like whittle away at every possible like projecting your opinions onto this concept and you're getting rid of all of that

[01:06:49] to try to come up with some true definition. And of course in a lot of Plato's dialogues they just end up in a paria, right? Like it's just like I don't fucking know. But that I think is in some ways the process that they're talking about.

[01:07:03] What's not clear is how that gets you to like that double back, like self-justifying thing when it comes to the forms which might be a good bridge to the mystical aspects of this metaphor. Yeah. So I assume there was something like what's being done

[01:07:21] and like when they're talking about justice. I just want to also ask Socrates or Plato, like did you mean this and show him some Gettier cases? Is this what you meant by the dialectic whittling away things by providing counter examples? Yeah, I mean that's what it led to.

[01:07:38] So, you know, it's a good question whether he's spinning in his grave or he's like happy. I don't know. I'd like to think he's spinning in his grave. I'd like to too because – see this is the thing.

[01:07:52] This is why I was saying like although there's so many levels to read this stuff at. We haven't even talked about the allegory being a political allegory of like sort of freeing people who are in us. Yeah, right, right, of course. Like false consciousness.

[01:08:07] My aside that I had before was the way we've been talking about it. It's a metaphor not an allegory. There's a way of understanding this as a sort of static description of the levels of reality. And then there's the part that's like actively like the prisoner breaks free,

[01:08:20] walks up there. And I think that allegory by allegory here, I mean just like that story aspect like pilgrims progress or whatever. Like the stages of walking up there mean something about the journey that you're going.

[01:08:32] What seems to me to be deeply true is this belief that we were talking about earlier that there is this level, this layer of truth that is accessible to you. And this is different than what I think of as an analytic philosopher doing Gettier cases.

[01:08:49] Here there seems to be such this pull toward the good and the lack of real discussion about what that good is and what this process is. Vibe so hard as somebody who's saying just enough to get you interested in knowing stuff, but not enough because there are secrets.

[01:09:10] There's a deep truth that you need to get to yourself. They're turning you around. They're turning you around and the light and all that, like the fire. And so what I was just like, what I've all been fascinated for a while about is this strand of mysticism.

[01:09:27] And I think this is actually the beginning of everything that we call mysticism in the modern forums, like whether it's Jewish, Sufi. And I know less about Sufism than anything else. But my understanding is that there is a direct line from Platonism

[01:09:45] to everything that we call mysticism nowadays. And it goes through the sort of neoplatonism that it's just the label that we call Plotinus' era of interpreting Plato. Like Plotinus didn't think it was different in kind from Plato. He just thought he was giving the right reading of Plato.

[01:10:04] And the reading is that like there are these levels of reality, like the good for Plotinus is the monad, the one. It is the source of everything. Which is very consistent, I think, with the dialogue. Yeah. And so like I'm scratching the surface here,

[01:10:20] but one of the things that just comes out of this tradition is this sort of view of all existence, of all just reality emanating from the one. So there is whatever this monad is, this ultimate thing that is perfect

[01:10:35] or maybe not perfect, but just is like the ultimate thing. Yeah. But that's actually the great way to describe it. It is. It just is, right. That these different layers of reality where we're finally at the lowest layer

[01:10:52] of reality, which is the material world, we're just chunks of that. We emanated from that. And we work our way back to that knowledge. Like if we want to, if we strive for it, we work our way back to that knowledge.

[01:11:07] So for Plotinus, it was, yeah, the material world that I guess even Plato believed was sort of created by a demiurge of some sort. We are fundamentally the same stuff. Which is super different from like the standard Christianity, which is what mysticism is in contrast to. More dualistic.

[01:11:28] Yeah. That believes that God is some stuff and he made the material world out of nothing. Like it's not like part of him. It's not like the body of the God that became the sea or whatever. And so the Gnostics, for instance, had some version of Platonism

[01:11:43] that Plotinus actually thought was wrong. But their version of Platonism was that the material world was actually evil. And everything about being in this material world, like this lowest layer of the metaphysics, was created by an evil demiurge.

[01:12:01] And we needed to get back to like the true good. Plotinus thinks that the Gnostics are crazy for thinking that the material world is evil and kind of mocks them. But one of the things that the Gnostics had that follows from this emanationism, that follows from Plato,

[01:12:15] is that in every human being, the soul contains this divine spark that is that little bit that is still in you that is part of the one, the good. Yes. Right. Right. Yeah. That's yearning for this. Yeah. And you're part—we're all divine in some way.

[01:12:33] We all have that still in us. And it's only by focusing on that that we can get free the shackles, like free from the shackles of the material world and get merged back into the one.

[01:12:44] And so how you do that, like different brands of mysticism have different views. But like in some way, it's like a deeply personal connection with the one. Yes. And how you get there, whether it's meditation or prayer or being an ascetic,

[01:13:01] you know, completely denying yourself of all pleasures like— Or just talking to people on the streets of Athens. Yeah. And it's kind of secret. Like you kind of got to learn it from some guy and then experience it yourself. This is Plotinus now?

[01:13:17] This is just what I think most mysticism has become. But Plotinus very heavily, my understanding again, was that he thought that there was like deep reflection that you could connect to the good. And I think he thought Plato thought that. But also that it was secret.

[01:13:31] Well, yeah, that's the thing that Plato actually— there was a lot that he wasn't putting into these dialogues. And so apparently there is a lot of discussion about like all of the things that Plato didn't say

[01:13:43] that they thought he might just not have wanted to put into the dialogues. Because it would have been a threat to like polytheism or something or— I'm not sure, actually. I'm not sure why not. Like I think it's less about gatekeeping.

[01:13:55] I think it's more about knowing that it's just like a— actually like the way that you do it is you just deeply connect in a personal way to like the one. And there's no good way. Like you can't just write that down. Well, right. No.

[01:14:09] And I think, you know, the sense you get from like the Republic and the dialogues— and I don't like to say what Plato thought. And I'm like a little annoying about this. But like the sense you get is both that this isn't something that can be described.

[01:14:24] It has to be done, which is very like in line with a lot of mystical traditions. Like you said, practice and like inquiry is going to get you there. It's not something I can articulate and you can just understand theoretically.

[01:14:38] But then the sense I get from the dialogues is that it's a democratic process. Now that's weird to say in the context of the Republic when you're talking about the noble lie,

[01:14:50] which is a lie that like keeps like 99 percent of the population in the dark about like essential things and a rigged sex lottery that nobody knows about. But like from most of Plato's dialogues, you get the sense that if you're just a philosopher,

[01:15:07] like however that happens, there's nothing to be kept secret. Like this is something that anybody can do. Like a slave boy already knows the Pythagorean theorem. They don't even have—they just have to be shown that they already know that, right?

[01:15:24] Like so that's in Plato's dialogue, the Mino. So like the nativism and the mysticism I think are connected here. Like spark of the good is like the recollection. It's like you're not discovering things. You're remembering things, you know. You're not learning new things.

[01:15:43] You're just realizing that you already know these things if you just shed yourself. This is another thing that I think is like part of the mysticism of this. You have to shed yourself of the chains and like your opinions and your projections

[01:16:00] and your minds that might end up leading you to the truth. But more likely it will end up turning you into somebody that's like will die on the hill of the illusion, right? Like that's how it normally works, especially in a democracy.

[01:16:15] So like it's democratic but it's also not something that thrives in a democracy. At least that's the sense you get from The Republic. Yeah, I totally feel that too. Like this should be open to everybody. I guess like the commonality is still that it's experience.

[01:16:34] And that's why like the vibe I'm getting from like Socrates is like well, I can't just say it. Like you have to experience it. Right, which isn't elitist. Like to say that there's a lot of things that you would have to experience, you know.

[01:16:47] But that still anybody could presumably do. Yeah. I guess there are people who look at Plato's discussion of geometry and Pythagoras and think he was, you know, there were all these like weird mystery cults. And Pythagoras was certainly one of those.

[01:17:04] And they think that he was definitely influenced by this sort of like the mysteries of numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. I think that's, again, I don't like to attribute anything to Plato himself.

[01:17:17] But it definitely does seem like he was fascinated with that, obsessed with that to the point where you could think. And I think it's because I think you get that in book seven. This is the stepping stone, the final stepping stone.

[01:17:31] And not one you can skip over, not one you can jump over to just dialectic and the forms. Like you have to do this even though that's still reflections of the forms. You need your eyes to adjust, right?

[01:17:45] And like I don't know, like we could talk about what the eyes adjusting is a metaphor for. But I think it's a metaphor for getting your soul, your reasoning soul in the proper place where it can go beyond just deducing theorems from axioms.

[01:18:01] It can recognize something that's actually true. But the untutored soul is not doing that, right? Like the untutored soul, there's no way they can do that. They're still in the cave. They're still chained. Like you need to be released.

[01:18:18] You need to see the fire, be blinded by the fire. You need to get outside the cave. You need time. Like all that is like these are necessary steps. And mathematics is the last necessary step and logic like reasoning that you do from assumed ultimate principles.

[01:18:39] So what's not clear to me, but it seems to me so different to get to the point where you understand that justice isn't mere fairness. To like what seems more like a feeling of knowing the good as the one, as the monad, as the source of everything.

[01:18:56] Which does seem like that sounds more like what you're going for by doing all this stuff is this deep experience. Yeah, it's like, oh my gosh. Touch the infinite.

[01:19:06] You've touched the infinite and that reverberates back to then justify a lot of the stuff that you were doing before that you didn't have a justification for. But you were doing like once you have that awakening, right? Then you're not changing like what you're doing.

[01:19:23] So like that's the other aspect. Can you indulge me a little Buddhist parallels thing? Yeah, of course. Listen to my Gnostic screams. And actually I thought that was awesome. Like I really want to know more about it. It's so cool. I just want to study.

[01:19:40] Before I forget, there is a channel called on YouTube called Esoterica where there's a PhD who talks about everything. Alchemy, you know, like Gnosticism, you know, early Yahwism. Like the guy's a scholar, but it's just such a great resource. I think you would actually love it.

[01:19:55] I'm bookmarking it right now. So there are some striking parallels between Buddhist like awakenings and the journey out of the cave, right? Like the path to awakening has these markers.

[01:20:10] The idea that we're prisoners bound by this illusion that permeates the everyday world and obscures what's actually real, right? It's so I mean it's uncannily Buddhist. It's uncannily Buddhist. Yes, exactly. So I don't know if it's Buddhist specific or just mystical specific.

[01:20:29] But that there are stages of clarity and that it takes discipline, right? It takes like this stuff, you know, depending on the Buddhist tradition. But like in Zen, there are these steps that you have to do.

[01:20:42] But even though there are steps and there's discipline, there's also that kind of blinding first flash of insight, right? Like that just ultimate like holy shit. And one of the striking parallels is like that it can be too much at first, like a dark night of the soul.

[01:21:02] Like you're overwhelmed by it, which is definitely true. The prisoner who comes out of the cave is just blinded and can't do anything.

[01:21:09] And the whole reason they're looking at shadows and the lake is just because they can't process like what's in front of them and they need some time. But then once you settle and relax into it, there's this like clarity that finally kind of eases in.

[01:21:26] And now you're perceiving like true being what truly is, right? The thing that is prior to what we import onto reality with the mind, with concepts, whatever's before that, whatever's prior to that, the true being. So that's one parallel.

[01:21:43] Then the other parallels like between the good and what's usually called like a wake awareness. This idea that it both illuminates everything else, like in Plato, the forms, Buddhism, it's just all experience. Like awake awareness illuminates it, but it's also the source of it, right?

[01:22:03] Like it also everything arises out of it. And so it has this both epistemological and metaphysical relation to us in that it allows us to see these things and everything arises out of it,

[01:22:17] which I think is very much like the good and the forms arising out of the good and everything arising out of the forms.

[01:22:25] And then the second aspect of that, remember Plato says that it is both something that illuminates the other forms and the other forms arrives out of it, but it's also an object of knowledge itself. Right? That's a big thing that he hits on. Again, another big parallel, right?

[01:22:46] Like the ultimate knowledge is awareness of awareness. Like the thing that is, that which is. Awake awareness is the thing that illuminates all aspects of our experience, but it's also something that we can be or our awareness can be aware of. Right? And that's like the good.

[01:23:05] It's like it is an object of knowledge itself. It's both responsible for everything including us, but it's also something that can be an object of knowledge itself. So those are some of the parallels.

[01:23:18] There's a big difference, even in the difference there are some parallels that I think are related to our discussion of dialectic, but it is a big difference. Like you said, in Buddhist mysticism usually the path there is meditation and that's a solitary experience.

[01:23:35] You might have a guru or a guide to give you pointers, which is also kind of parallel, like the pointing and the direction of. But like in a lot of traditions you don't need it, right? Like because it's already here.

[01:23:50] Whereas I think for Socrates this is a difference. Like the key to awakening is through this philosophical conversation, right? And it's dialectic requires that, right? And it requires two people on relatively equal footing just trying to get at the truth.

[01:24:08] Whereas the guru's student relationship is more like the guru has the truth and is pointing the other person in the direction of it. Which arguably is also like the cave metaphor, but still like dialectic itself is very much a two-person or more thing.

[01:24:27] It's interesting that in the cave the original guide just frees himself. Well, he doesn't actually. He is freed. It's not clear that he frees himself and he is dragged up.

[01:24:40] But even in that key difference, and I really do think it's a key difference, you know, like Buddhism is a lot more hermetic. Like Socrates was the opposite of hermetic. Like he was like, I need to be talking to people. But what is dialectic?

[01:24:57] It is that winnowing down of a concept to its essence, right? Like what is the good shorn of anything concrete? Like any of our thoughts about what the good is. What is the good, right? Like separated from good things, right? That is dialectic.

[01:25:17] What meditation is in a lot of sense is trying to winnow down experience underneath whatever the mind projects onto experience. Just trying to be like, what if I just sat here and just let what happens happen.

[01:25:34] And you're trying to get to the point where there are no shadows, there's no fire, there's no people putting up statues or shadow puppets. It's just, you know, like your actual experience.

[01:25:47] That's also what dialectic is working towards, that winnowing down, that just cutting out of everything we project onto a concept to try to get to the concept itself. But again, there's a key difference which is the kind of awake awareness is prior to concepts.

[01:26:04] And I think Plato's concept, like ultimately it's about concepts. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. That's a big thing I was going to ask you. Like there's that tension there that Plato does seem to be describing this as uncovering.

[01:26:21] It's both, like you say, like sort of peeling the curtain back or like dropping the scales from your eyes. But one reveals concepts and the other one reveals whatever that truth of Buddhism is. Which is prior to concepts, beyond concepts. Yeah, right.

[01:26:38] The other thing that I was going to ask you about is the relation between the good, like in the allegory of the cave there's just this clear sort of causal relationship between like the real tree and the shadow cut out and the shadow.

[01:26:54] And when you're getting to the real tree, like the world of forms is what's causing the illusions of the shadows. But in Buddhism I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, like it feels like these are all deceptions. They're not merely copies of copies.

[01:27:10] It's all just not true or illusory, I guess. Yeah, well, yeah, right. It's like, you know, there's a Zen thing of once you understand a mountain it becomes not a mountain and then it becomes a mountain again. So you understand it. Like the tea. Yeah, the right way.

[01:27:29] But you're right that there aren't these copies of copies kinds of things. Or at least, like look I'm not an expert, I'm not a Buddhist scholar by any means I want to be very clear. But like, this is coming straight out of my ass.

[01:27:45] But you're right, you're totally right, I think, that there isn't these layers. You know, there's no like mathematics. There aren't these intermediate stages really. It's all illusion, it's all maya until it's not. Right. But that said, there are different stages of awakening, you know.

[01:28:05] Like there's, but it's very different than the Plato one. There's like, oh, you're a witness. So you can like experience life as a witness of everything that's happening but still you're separate from everything that happens.

[01:28:18] And then there's the stage where you realize it's all arising and you're part of that, you know. So there are stages but it's not the same kind of relation as the stages in Plato.

[01:28:31] It's interesting because like when you sort of like start looking at the metaphysics that grew out of Platonism that go into, you know, whatever like middle late and then late Platonism and then the people inspired by that like Gnostics.

[01:28:44] There are just like huge charts of like how the good is related to the whatever, you know. There's the news and they're like, and it's like that the metaphysics like multiplies like the number entities in a way that I think Buddhism would just be like,

[01:28:57] ah, you guys just, you're failing to realize it's all the same thing. Yeah. All right. Do we have anything else to talk about? What else did we want to talk about? You know, we were going to talk about just nativism.

[01:29:06] Yeah, like, yeah, yeah, we should talk about that, right? Okay, yeah. So like the part that I want to ask you about, which is not, it's not like so spelled out in The Allegory of the Cave,

[01:29:14] but I guess in other dialogues where it's just explicitly said that all learning is remembering. And there is this just strong nativist position that we have knowledge that's built into our minds already. We're born with it. Yeah. I don't know if it can be directly credited to Plato,

[01:29:33] but I think you can again draw a pretty straight line to Platonic nativism all the way to modern cognitive science approaches that are nativist. Whether that's because of the Platonic inspiration or because it's like true. I don't know.

[01:29:48] You know, like it could both have gotten there because it's true. Yeah. That's interesting. Like, because the reason people believe that now has to do, I would assume, with Darwinian theory.

[01:30:01] Yeah. But you can go to Kant, right? Like Kant, you draw a straight line from Kant to Piaget in modern developmental psychology. That's true. Yeah. He was just like, look, without these categories, the child couldn't make sense of the world.

[01:30:14] So he wrote like the children's conception of time, the children's conception of space. Like these were the categories that Kant had laid out. Yeah. And it's like, it's a really interesting idea. Yeah. That section where he says that the slave knows the Pythagorean theorem. The Mino.

[01:30:30] Yeah. That's very modern developmental psychology. I guess what's different is that modern cognitive science doesn't think that you can reflect somehow and get closer to the true, true things.

[01:30:42] Right. They're just like, oh yeah, the way that we parse objects, it has to be that we cut like that our brain is prepared for, for parsing experience in a way that gives us access to this, not deeply getting to the thing in itself.

[01:30:54] Here's a question that would probably be something that would need its own episode. But, you know, when Plato is talking about the slave child that gets the Pythagorean theorem in the Mino,

[01:31:11] it still requires this like dialectic, essentially this way of guiding him to the point where he can realize that he already knows this. I wonder if Plato wasn't thinking of this in the kind of nativist versus non-nativist terms like we think of it now,

[01:31:34] but that we've like projected that onto Plato because we have this strict dichotomy that somehow emerged since then between them. But as much as I'd like to say that I love things where we project our own categories on the past.

[01:31:52] Like I do think he really thought that it is in you. Like these things, and this is the other connection to mysticism. Once we are connected with these forms, like our soul will be reflections of them. We will be like them as much as we can.

[01:32:12] Our soul will reflect them, will be in the same ideal order as the forms themselves. So I don't know. Yeah, that's interesting that that's built into the way that Plato describes nativism. Again, it's stretching to say that any modern science is Platonist in this way,

[01:32:28] but it is true of I think the fairly sophisticated Piagetian nativism. That's not just the concepts, you just know it. Like he really thinks that cognitive development causes like you need interactions for the knowledge to like come in. It's dormant in you.

[01:32:47] Yeah, it's like just like a tree requires sun and water to grow, even though the information was in the seed. Without that stuff, it's not going to get there. And there's a lot of sort of dumb nativism, just so nativism that evolutionary psychology gave

[01:33:03] that doesn't take that into account in the way that clearly Plato did and Piaget probably did. Yeah, and that's a really interesting image that you gave of the tree that both has in the seed all that it needs to grow, but also needs sun.

[01:33:20] Because on the one hand, that's very much like a great description of what people need in philosophy. They have this in them, but they need nurturing. But on the other hand, like I think Plato thought that the philosopher,

[01:33:36] at least once that's happened, is self-sufficient and doesn't need like it's more like a rock. Like it doesn't need anything to stay a rock. Like that's the goal. And this is why Stoics were so inspired by Plato or Socrates.

[01:33:52] Like you get to the point where you don't require anything from the external world because you're so self-sufficiently focused on the forms. Can we wrap up on this note, which is it's mind-blowing to me the influence that this stuff has had just on the world.

[01:34:11] Like I was reading just like, it's not just mysticism, like all of Christianity. Like Augustine was heavily influenced by Platonism and Neoplatonism and it just made its way into what we think of as like given to us by the Bible.

[01:34:25] But no, like there are these people who were seriously into Socrates and Plato and that worked its way into what we think of as the divine story of Jesus. The Crusades, like the Inquisition, like everything, like Sufi mysticism, like a lot of Muslim.

[01:34:46] Yeah, right. They were all influenced by like, you know, Plotinus was Egyptian, right? So he was, it's all there. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, he was an Egyptian. It's so cliche to say that it's all a footnote to Plato.

[01:34:58] But there's so much, such deep, it's so true. Yeah, and like I do think, you know, it's not that he's the only, he's like maybe the supreme figure like in the West. But there's also so many parallels between him and different non-Western traditions.

[01:35:15] And then like, it's not, this isn't just me. Like a lot of people have written about Plato and Eastern philosophy. So yeah, it's kind of amazing. It does make me think of Joseph Campbell and you know, this idea. We gotta do Joseph Campbell. I think we absolutely do.

[01:35:35] Like we're not going to get a chance to talk about this as a hero's journey, but I thought that was pretty interesting. This idea of the cave as just another example of the hero's journey. And like you said in our notes, Prometheus. And Prometheus, yeah.

[01:35:47] Luke Skywalker, you know, when he came back. And not coincidence, you know. All right. Well, this was fun. I'm glad we did this. I hope other people enjoyed it.

[01:36:01] Yeah, like I hope people get what they don't get is the mistakes that we've probably made in our descriptions of lots of stuff. But rather the energy and interest that we provide for you to go look at this stuff. That's basically what we have to offer.

[01:36:17] Insight. Yeah, but energy, excitement, enthusiasm. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.