Full transcript
0:12I don't know if any other personality course
0:14in North America talks about Binswanger and Boss anymore maybe not
0:18But I think their ideas are extremely interesting
0:22And so I'm going to talk about them
0:25They were influenced very much by Martin Heidegger
0:29Who was one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers
0:33I would say probably - This school of
0:38This part of the phenomenological school
0:40was more influenced directly by a philosopher than any other school.
0:43And just to reiterate because you might keep wondering why
0:48I discuss so many philosophers in this course
0:51It's because
0:54Clinical Psychology in particular is not strictly a scientific enterprise
0:59It's because it's oriented towards values as far as I can tell
1:05And I don't see that there is any way of getting around that
1:08and that because what you are trying to do as a clinical psychologist
1:11and perhaps what you're trying to do with your own life is to figure out how to live properly
1:15Now you can construe that as the absence of illness
1:18Which is - That's about as close as you get to a scientific model of living well
1:24So you don't have any illnesses
1:26But even the idea of illness is an idea that's not precisely scientific
1:30It's an amalgam of scientific concepts and ethical concepts
1:35so
1:36There is no escaping it and if you're in the domain of ethics or values
1:40Then you're in what is more or less a philosophical domain
1:43But also if you're a scientist - if you're a scientist who is interested in personality
1:49It's also something you have to grapple with conceptually
1:51Because people live within an ethic and the ethic structures their perceptions
1:55And so even to study human beings as objects
1:58You still have to take into account they ensconce themselves within a value system
2:03and you have to understand what that means
2:05So for me it's easier and more straightforward just to get right to the root of matter to begin with
2:10and these people also had insanely interesting ideas
2:12They're really useful to know
2:14And so this, I would say maybe these
2:17The philosophy that underpins this might be the most complex of all the philosophies
2:21That we're going to discuss
2:25And that's really saying something because there is no shortage of complexities say in Jung
2:29And it's very difficult to portray what these people were up to
2:34I started by telling you, when we discussed Rogers a little bit
2:38That the phenomenologists were interested in the fact that people live within a self-defined perceptual world
2:47That might be one way of thinking about it
2:52Part of the way to start to conceptualize what that means is to consider for a moment
2:58just consider for a moment how many things there are in this room that you might look at
3:03and the answer to that is there's an infinite number of them
3:06Depending on how you're going to scale your perceptions
3:08You could spend, if you were a painter, you could spend a month painting that tile
3:13Painting a representation of that tile because it's infinitely complex
3:17To get the colors right, to get the patterns right, there's no end to it really
3:21Because to make a representation that was accurate
3:24It would have to be as detailed as the thing itself and it's crazily detailed
3:29But you don't concentrate on that sort of thing
3:30So you think, you're surrounded by an infinite number of potential things to apprehend
3:35But that isn't the world you live in
3:37The world you live in is a very very constrained subset of those things
3:42And part of the question is then: what's the nature of that constrained subset
3:46That's what you inhabit that's what makes up your experience
3:49And also how is it related to the infinitely complex objects that are around you
3:55And that's really what these people were trying to figure out.
3:58So you're in this perceptual frame, that's one way of thinking about it.
4:02That's the Dasein, by the way
4:04That's the existential frame or the phenomenological frame
4:08Because you can't think about it merely as perception
4:10Because it contains also, all of the things you experience subjectively
4:14The emotions and the Qualia that
4:18You know Qualia is an element of being
4:21that say philosophers or scientists of consciouness have a particularly difficult time with.
4:26And it's like - it's the quality of pain which doesn't seem reducible to a set of objective facts
4:30Or the quality of color, or the quality of beauty, or the quality of love, or the quality of sorrow
4:36Those things seem irreducible to some degree in and of themselves
4:39Like what is pain made of? It doesn't even seem like a reasonable question.
4:43I mean you can say, how do you decompose the neurological circuits that are involved in the experience of pain? Fine.
4:51But to ask what pain consists of or is composed of or what beauty is composed of, or love.
4:57Seems to be - There is something wrong with the formulation of that question
5:01Because those things sort of manifest them self as raw facts of existence
5:06And so they're constituent elements of this - of your field of experience
5:10Your phenomenological frame or this Dasein
5:14Which is the way that Heidegger conceptualized it.
5:18That's being there with you at the center of your what? Your realm of experience
5:28Now here's some characteristics of the Dasein
5:31The thing that makes up you
5:34The past and the present are implicit in it
5:37What does that mean?
5:39Well, say you have a particular emotional response to something, maybe it's a negative emotional response.
5:46And you see this very frequently with arguments with people
5:49You're having an argument with someone you love. Like a family member, that's a good example
5:52So lets say it's the same damn fight you've had with your mother 50 times
5:57Okay that's interesting because what it means is that
6:00All of those 50 times you've fought with your mother are implicit in this fight
6:05So althought it's taking place right here and now, the past has shaped it
6:10And if you wanted to investigate the fight completely
6:14You'd have to get to the bottom of that entire train of interactions you've had with your mother
6:18So it's implicit in your current experience that's one way of thinking about it
6:24But the future is implicit in it too because
6:27What you're doing right now, it's as if the future is folded up in what you're experiencing right now and it unfolds as you interact with it
6:34And so the reason it's conditional to some degree on you and your past is because
6:40it's your past and you that are determining the actions that you undertake right now that determine how the future is going to unfold around you
6:47Now not completely obviously because you don't have complete control over how things unfold
6:54But you seem to have some ability to determine how things unfold
6:59So one of the ways I've sort of conceptualized the phenomenological viewpoint
7:04This is one way of thinking about it I believe is that
7:06Instead of thinking - It does mean you have to reconceptualize your idea of objects
7:12Like an object seems like a unidimensional thing in some sense. It's an object.
7:16But most of the things people interact with aren't like that at all
7:19So like here's an example
7:22Let's say you have
7:24Let's say you get
7:26You're writing the MCAT, you want to go to medical school
7:28You've written the MCAT, you get the envelope in the mail, it tells you what your score is
7:32You hold the envelope, what are you holding?
7:36Well if you think about it from an objective perspective, it's an envelope
7:38Who cares? It's just a little piece of paper right?
7:41It's a rectangle of paper
7:44But that isn't what you're holding at all
7:46That's not what that thing is, that's how you see it. But it's not what it is at all and you know that. Your body knows that
7:53Because you're shaking. Well, what are you scared of? The envelope?
7:57Well the fact that you see it as an envelope is only an indication of just how narrow your perceptions actually are.
8:05Because it's a portal.
8:07Right? it's a portal through which you are going to walk into one of two worlds
8:11One in which you're in medical school and the other in which you're not
8:15And it also actually contains the past
8:17Which is really strange because you think, well you already know what the past is. No you don't.
8:22Whatever that score is in there determines what your past was and you know that too.
8:28You go watch a movie and a bunch of things happen in the movie and then something twisted happens at the end and all the sudden (trilling)
8:33Everything that you thought about the movie was wrong
8:36and a whole new past for the movie pops into being
8:39Well, are you a pre-med student? A valid pre-med student? Well the score will determine whether or not you were.
8:47Very strange, very strange
8:49Because you think of the past as fixed
8:51You know? And you think of the things you're interacting with as the things that you see and they're not
8:57And you're body is smarter than that, way smarter than that. Because it responds to, you could say
9:02And this is sort of a Rogerian perspective, your body is more likely to respond to what the thing actually is, than how it is that you see it.
9:09Okay so, the past is implicit in the current being
9:13and the future is implicit in the current being
9:16And so the past and the future sort of folded up inside it
9:20And you can unfold them and take a look at them
9:29Now, here's the next thing
9:31So, from a classic scientific perspective,
9:35There's the world of independently existing objects and there's the world of subjects
9:39And the subject is really in a secondary relationship to the object
9:44Because the objective world is what's real
9:45But one of the things that the phenomenologists were concerned about that
9:51Is that, well you run into this problem again of exactly how it is that you define the object
9:57Because, just as the envelope with the scores in it can't be reduced to the paper,
10:06So the object that you're interacting with only reveals what it is as a consequence of the way that you interact with it
10:14So for example if you take a complex object like another person
10:18It's like well, what is it that you are. Well a huge part of that is going to depend on exactly how I interact with you
10:24Because you could be a raging beast if I interacted with you one way
10:28and you could be a perfectly, you know, cooperative entity that was very pleasant if I interacted with you another way
10:35And so partly what's happening - you can think of what you're interacting with as something that's really multi-faceted. Truly multi-faceted
10:43And you say, well you're trying to determine what it is.
10:47But the problem is that what it is manifests itself only in accordance with how you behave towards it
10:52And it's actually the case with even objects that you reduce right down to their constituent elements
10:59So you might say like lets talk about subatomic particles. Hypothetically, the most objective thing there is
11:04Well it turns out that whether they're a wave or a particle depends on the way you set up the experiment
11:10Now I don't want to make quantum analogies but what I'm saying is that the object is a very very complicated thing
11:16And so even defining what it is means you have to adopt a frame of reference with regards to it
11:21And you undertake only some procedures and not others
11:25So, when you're defining an object even scientifically you actually don't define the object.
11:29What you say is here is a multi-dimensional entity if you approach it in this manner, that's the procedure, right? The methods.
11:37If you approach it in that manner, it will manifest that set of traits
11:41But the problem is, is that there's all sorts of other traits that it could manifest just as well
11:45If you treated it a different way
11:47And so the object itself is not something that - it's not something easily reducible to a single set of properties
11:55I was talking to one of my students yesterday, he had a pretty smart thing to say about images.
12:00We were talking about deep images you know the sorts that you might see in a really high quality museum
12:05So maybe they're I don't know 15th century or 16th century renaissance masterpieces
12:12They're inexhaustible to some degree
12:14Which is why they're in museums and people go look at them you know decade after decade
12:19And it's partly because
12:22Every time you look at them you're different
12:24You go in one week, you look at it, you see something. You go in the next week, you look at it and you see something else.
12:29Well it's partly because
12:31You're bringing something entirely different to the situation
12:35and the image is complicated enough to allow it to reflect something new to you depening on the stance you take in relationship to it
12:43And lots of things are like that
12:44lots of things are like that
12:46A book you read when you were sixteen is going to be an entirely different book when you read it when you're 35
12:50Say well the book's the same. It's like, it depends on how you define the book
12:55Because it isn't even obvious where the book is exactly
12:58Well it's on my shelf in the library
13:00It's like no, that's a chunk of paper that's on your shelf in the library
13:05Where exactly the book is, that's a much more difficult question to consider
13:10So it depends on how you define the book
13:13So without a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such
13:19True this implies that every object
13:21Everything objective in being merely objectified by the subject is the most subjective thing possible
13:28Well you also know this again when you're in an argument with someone
13:30"it's you"
13:31"no, it's you"
13:32"no it's you"
13:33It's like, you don't know
13:35Are you being biased? Are you looking at the situation incorrectly?
13:39The person you're arguing with trying to convince you that it's your problem
13:43You think "no you made me angry"
13:46It's like hmm an interesting statement you know? as if you could do that
13:51But it does seem that way, you were being provocative
13:54"Well you're just too sensitive"
13:56"hmm how are we going to settle that?"
13:58Well it's a continual argument and that again has to do with the crazy entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception
14:13I've showed you this before and I actually think this is a pretty good
14:16Schematic representation of what's meant by Dasein
14:20And this is a complicated little diagram
14:22Although the diagram itself is quite simple
14:26It's predicated on the following assumptions
14:30You need to narrow down your world
14:32and what you're doing is narrowing it down from lets say an infinite set of possibilities
14:37To a finite set of manageable possibilities
14:39and you do that a bunch of ways
14:41Partly - merely - you can't your senses aren't acute enough to detect everything.
14:46So pure stupidity in some sense stops you from being absolutely overwhelmed
14:52You don't have eyes in the back of your head for example so you don't have to worry about all those things you're not looking at behind you
14:57But then it's far more than that
14:59You just can't handle that full complexity so there's a continual narrowing process
15:04And then you exist inside that narrowed reality
15:06Like if I look at you like that
15:09There's not a hell of a lot of difference between that looking at you like that
15:13Like I can't really see these people. I can tell they're people, that's all
15:17I can see your face
15:19I've got just about all of it right there
15:22That's a very narrow and you know you're moving your eyes around
15:25and inhabiting this constant narrow space
15:28Well what's that space - what does that space you inhabit consist of
15:33Well that's Dasein that space that you inhabit and so we can say
15:36It's something like this
15:38You have implicit in that perception a sense of where you are and what you are doing right now
15:43it's in the perception
15:44and then in the perception as well is what you're aiming at
15:48Because you're not just sitting here passively or you'd be asleep or you'd be unconscious
15:52You're sitting here doing nothing
15:55You know, physically
15:56But you have an aim in mind and the aim is what you're pointing your eyes at
16:00The aim is what's structuring your perceptions
16:02The aim is what's revealing that part of the world that is being revealed to you, to you
16:10That's the revelation of the world
16:12It also structures your emotions. It also primes your behaviors
16:15So it's not a drive, it's not a goal
16:18it's not a motivation, it's more than that. It's all of that at once.
16:23That's sort of what your personality is
16:25You see the phenomenologists don't really think about personality
16:28They think about the manifestation of your reality
16:32It's not exactly your personality
16:34It's that you're the center of a reality and you constitute that reality
16:39But all of your elements of experience constitute that reality and so it's simplest element is something like
16:44Where you are and where you're going and the embodied actions you undertake to relate those two things
16:52Which would include your eye movements because of course perception is an active phenomena
16:57You are shaking your eyes back and forth unbelievable rapidly
17:00Otherwise, if you can make your eyes stand still, which you can do with great concentration
17:05Everything will black out
17:07Because you have to move your eyes back and forth so the light hits different cells cause the cells get exhausted
17:14And then they stop reporting. So you're just whipping your eyes back and forth in a micro-way constantly
17:21And as well as moving them around voluntarily and involuntarily
17:25So even perception is a lot more like feeling things out with your fingers
17:29Even when you're using your ears or your eyes
17:31It's very active, there's no passive perception
17:34it's a motor act to perceive
17:36and so your motor act is determined by your hierarchy of values that's one way of looking at it
17:40So another way of thinking about it is that's how the past and future are implicit in it
17:46Your very active perception is determined by your entire value structure
17:50So
17:51It's implicit inside of it, it's folded up inside of it
17:54You can tell that too because if something violates it
17:57Again, maybe an argument with someone
17:59It's good to think about people as the thing you interact with the most as the canonical object
18:05Cause they're so damn complicated and they get in the way all the time and when someone gets in the way of what you're doing
18:10You know, it isn't obvious what they're interfering with
18:13It might be the little micro-routine that you're undertaking right now
18:17You know, maybe you go home and you make a nice dinner and the person you're making it for is all rude about it
18:22Okay so what exactly are they getting in the way of?
18:26Well
18:28They're certainly getting in the way of your expectations of having a nice emotional time for the next hour
18:35But you have no idea how indicative that is of some serious flaw
18:38In you, or them, or the relationship, or the situation, or the way you've conducted your whole life
18:43Or the way they've conducted their whole life
18:46and all of that's packed in there
18:48It's sort of like the unconscious of the psychoanalysts
18:51but it's more - it's not the same conceptualization. It's another way of looking at the same phenomena
18:57So
18:59Alright so the two people we're going to talk about most are Medard Boss
19:03And he was influenced by Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher
19:07Taken to task often because he turned out to be tangled up with the Nazis more than he should've been
19:13And Husserl, that's Edmund Husserl, who was actually if I remember correctly was Martin Heidegger's teacher
19:19That's Ludwig Binswanger - and they were
19:21Both of these two people were influenced both by Freud and Jung
19:26Okay so here is one of Binswanger's claims
19:29I love this claim it's such a cool idea
19:31And I think there is neurological support for it. Neuropsychological support
19:34What we perceive are "first and foremost" not impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch
19:41Not even in things or objects, but meanings
19:43Well that's an interesting idea
19:45Because
19:48You know it's been said that every person in an unconscious exponent of some great philosopher's presuppositions
19:54Well, mostly the way you think about the way you perceive is that there are objects in the world
19:59You see the objects
20:00You think about the objects, you evaluate the objects
20:03You decide how to act on the objects, and then you act
20:06Right? it's from
20:08Object, sense, perception, emotion, cognition, action
20:12That's wrong. That isn't how it works
20:15It's partly not the way it works because
20:18You're actually - the way that you interact with the world exists at multiple levels
20:22So for example
20:23You have reflexes so if I
20:26If I poke you hard, you'll react like that. You'll jerk back
20:32And that, you do that without thinking
20:33That's part of a neurological circuit that's very deeply embedded and that's virtually automatic
20:40It's reflexive. It doesn't require conscious perception at all
20:43It's too slow for starters
20:45And so you have - there's multiple levels of you interacting with the world.
20:50And at one level, you're seeing objects, you're thinking about them, you're planning what to do
20:54But you're doing all sorts of other things that are way faster than that and other things that are way slower at the same time.
21:00Now what Binswanger claims
21:03Is that what you see in the world are meanings
21:07So it's the meaning detection first and the object recognition second
21:12Now that's a hell of a claim, that is
21:14But there's definitely levels of your nervous system
21:16That operate in that manner
21:18So for example
21:19Here's a good example, people have blind sight
21:22There visual cortex is damaged they can't see objects
21:26So they think they're blind
21:27But if you show them an angry face, they'll manifest a change in the skin conductants, They'll orient
21:34And it means that the eyes are still mapping the face onto the amygdala
21:39And the amygdala is mapping the pattern onto the body, no object perception
21:43Pattern
21:44Pattern
21:45Pattern
21:46No object perception
21:48And so the meaning is what's being perceived first and foremost
21:53And you have to perceive meanings first because you actually want to stay alive
21:57That's the trick
21:58So the world is full of these things that have meanings to you that are relevant to your survival
22:04And what you're perceiving first is the relevance of the pattern to your survival
22:09And the idea that you can conceptualize that as a set of objects
22:12Well first of all, that's a pretty new idea
22:15Technically speaking, right? Because
22:17Technically speaking we didn't really start to conceive the world as subject in an objective world until we really formalized science
22:25Now science was implicit long before it became explicit
22:29But it didn't become explicit until about 500 years ago
22:32So you react to meanings
22:34So here's an example
22:36Babies
22:37if you
22:38If you have two surfaces and you put a piece of glass between them
22:41You know, they're elevated
22:43And you put an 8 month year old baby on the one surface so they can crawl
22:48It won't crawl across the space
22:51And you might say it sees a hole and won't crawl across it
22:56But that isn't what it sees. It sees a place to fall off
22:59Direct, that's direct perception
23:02So when I see this for example
23:04My eyes see that as a pattern
23:07That pattern's on my retina it's propagated through my optic nerve
23:11It's propagated into my brain, it's propagated onto my motor cortex
23:15And the propagation is
23:17This
23:18That
23:20Right? So I can pick it up
23:22And as soon as - when I look at that this is implicit
23:26That's implicit in the perception
23:28You think well why do you see that at the size and resolution you see it at?
23:32That's why
23:33So the fact that you see it that way has this implicit in it
23:36It isn't that you see the object and match your hand to it
23:39It's that matching your hand to it is part of the perception of the object
23:43It's what gives the object meaning
23:45And so you see actually you perceive the meaning of the object
23:48It's part of the perception
23:50And you can't not see the meaning of the object
23:53Well if you're a scientist you can sort of separate out the object from its meaning
23:58That's actually what science does
24:00It tears the object away from its meaning
24:03And then of course there is nothing meaningful left
24:05So science ends up value free. But that's because the meaning has been torn out of it
24:10Now there's technical reasons for doing that
24:11But Binswanger's point is don't kid yourself you see the meaning first. Here's an example
24:16You watch the trade towers fall
24:19What did you see?
24:22Well you could say you saw the towers fall
24:24It's like why are you in shock for two days afterwards then?
24:27Well because what are the towers exactly?
24:31As long as they're standing and operating, they're towers.
24:34As soon as they fall, God only knows what they are
24:37Maybe they're the beginning of the next war
24:40You know? Who knows what they are?
24:43And so everyone was in shock for three days
24:45Because what they saw was the indeterminate meaning of that event
24:50And it opened all sorts of gateways
24:52It's like well, the towers fell, there's gateways open everywhere.
24:56We don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going to happen next. We don't know where we are
25:00And that's direct perception mapped onto your body. Bang, you're in shock
25:04You see the meaning first
25:05And well you constrain it down to well why are you so upset?
25:09Well the towers fell
25:10It's like that's the best you can do for a verbal utterance
25:13It's what your perceptual systems reported to you
25:15But God only knows what happened
25:18We still don't really know what it meant that they fell
25:22Now most things have put themselves back together but
25:28And then you think well what does it mean?
25:30What does it mean that what you see first is the meaning?
25:33and that's a really tricky question because you might say well
25:36That's when you get back to the problem of what constitutes real
25:40So I could say well you've evolved to see the meaning
25:45Well then we might ask
25:46Well if you've evoled to see the meaning and that's kept you alive
25:49Is there anything more real than the meaning?
25:52Because somebody who is a materialist would say "well no, the object is more real"
25:55It's like no, it depends on how you define real
25:58It might be that the most real thing about the visual cliff is that that's a falling off place
26:03And that its secondary description as a you know an object
26:06A hole or something like that
26:08That's something you paint over the top of the primary reality
26:12And so,
26:16Well here's a practical application of it or at least one of the things I think is practical
26:20You know, you can have experiences that differ in their, lets call it, high quality meaning
26:26You know so you get engaged and engrossed in something and you're happy about that
26:29It's not that you're happy
26:30It's that you're engaged and engrossed in it, you would do it again
26:33Even though it might take effort
26:35You can tell that where you are is meaningful
26:38Well I think what happens in that situation is that
26:42You're in a Piagetian place
26:44Where many of the games that you're playing are stacked sort of isomorphically on top of one another
26:49And the experience of meaning is the fact that you're playing a small game properly
26:54Nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly
26:57Nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly too, etc all the way out
27:01Past is balanced, future is balanced everything is stacked up
27:05And there's a report coming from your being telling you that, that's why you're engaged
27:11You might say well maybe that's real. Maybe it's more real than anything else
27:15That's a strange thing because if you think that meaning is separate and secondary from the real objective world
27:21Then the reality is the object
27:24But it isn't obvious that the reality is the object
27:27It's certainly not how we act
27:30It's not how we perceive
27:33And so
27:35Did we evolve to perceive reality? It depends on what you mean by perceive
27:39Perceive might mean did we evolve mechanisms that allowed us to survive in the face of that reality. Yes.
27:47Is that whats real? What enables you to survive in the face of reality?
27:51It's a definition
27:53It's a perfectly reasonable definition unless you can come up with a better one
27:57Meanings are primary
28:00Now that brings up a strange issue
28:03So what determines the meaning of what it is you're perceiving
28:06Well this is where Binswanger and Boss disagree
28:11Binswanger says
28:12It's the a-priori ontological structure. The world design, or matrix of meaning
28:18Okay so what does that mean?
28:20Well, you have a particular history. Biological and cultural and individual
28:25And you're viewing the world through the lense of that set of particularities
28:31So it's almost if you are behind a curtain and the curtain has certain hoels in it
28:36And you can see through the wholes in the curtain
28:39but the curtain is your construction so the curtain with the holes determines what you see
28:45Well, Boss would say no it's the opposite in a very strange thing
28:50The meaning of the world manifests itself to you more or less of its own accord
28:55And
28:57It's a tougher one to explain
29:01Disclosure of meaning: Boss the revelation of the object
29:04The emergence of the phenomena: the numinous
29:07The very word phenomena is derived from phainesthai
29:11To shine forth, to appear, to unveil itself, to come out of concealment or darkness
29:15Okay here's an example you see someone beautiful
29:19Is it your perception
29:22is it your perception or does the beauty exist?
29:25That's the difference between Binswanger and Boss
29:28Cause Binswanger would say well the reason that thing appears to you as beautiful is because of the way you're filtering it
29:34And Boss would say no
29:36The beauty inheres in the object itself and manifests itself. It shines forth
29:42And so I really like this concept this concept of phenomena
29:46That's why they're phenomenologists
29:47phainesthai means to shine forth
29:49From the phenomenological perspective you pursue those things that shine forth
29:55Now you remember this is kind of a parallel idea
30:00I suppose it's a parallel of Jungian ideas
30:03You remember in Harry Potter that when they're playing Quidditch he's always chasing the snitch?
30:07And you remember how, if I've got this correctly,
30:10Quidditch is basically two games at the same time right? There's the standard game and there's the game that the seekers play
30:16Yes? I've got that right?
30:18What happens if the seeker gets the snitch?
30:20Games over right? They win
30:23Very interesting. She has a brilliant imagination that woman, Rowling
30:28So the idea is that in every game there's two games going on at the same time. There's the ordinary game
30:32And there's the game that the seekers play and the seekers chase the thing that shines at them
30:37And that's what that little thing is the snitch. It's a round circle with wings.
30:41It's a very very old old old symbol
30:44It's a symbol of what
30:46It's a symbol of reality before it's fractionated into its parts
30:51I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that
30:53It's a symbol of
30:54It's a symbol of
30:55Imagine that there are things that move forward to make you curious
30:59And you were trying to figure out what was common among all the things that made you curious
31:04That thing that Harry Potter's chasing, that's a symbol of that
31:07It's golden like the sun, it flits around and attracts your attention and it's always moving
31:12And if you're seeking, you chase it.
31:15So that's the phenomenological idea, that's the disclosure of meaning
31:19You say well when you're curious about something, why are you curious about that?
31:23Is it calling to you? Or is it something that you're interpreting?
31:28Well I would say it's both
31:29I think that's the way to resolve this puzzle
31:33It's that
31:33There isn't a perceiving entity without a structure
31:37And your structure has been evolving itself for three and a half billion years
31:41There's no perceiving entity without a structure
31:44But by the same token the thing that's being perceived
31:47Also shines forth with its own potential manifestation
31:51And you need to think of it both ways at the same time
31:54But the curiosity issue is a really fascinating one
31:57Because curiosity pulls you forward
32:00It's not random
32:02That's the thing that's so cool
32:03You can't really control it, but it's not random
32:07If your curiosity is random, you're schizophrenic
32:09And I mean that technically
32:11Because one of the things that happens to schziphrenics is that the mechanisms that establish relevance become pathologized
32:18And they see meaning everywhere, randomly
32:20And that's partly why they generate delusions
32:22Because the incoherent manifestation of meaning calls out for a representation
32:28They develop a paranoid delusion if they're intelligent enough to put everything together
32:32So you're curious and something pulls you forward
32:35Well you can interact with the curiosity and you can follow it but you can't really direct it
32:40The question is where is it taking you?
32:43So that little ball, that was a manifestation
32:47Of what the Greeks referred to - Greeks? Is that right? - Mercurius
32:51It's a Roman and Greek God Mercurius
32:53The spirit Mercurius is the messenger of the Gods. The winged messenger of the Gods
32:58It flits around
32:59You say well the curiosity pulls you forward
33:02To where?
33:03Well to wherever it wants to take you
33:06Well that's a Jungian idea as well
33:07Is that your curiosity is like the manifestation of your self to the ego
33:13Right? It's the thing that you could be in the future calling you forward
33:18Something like that
33:20Very strange idea
33:22Very interesting. See when you start to understand
33:25That you're not in control of what makes you interested in things
33:29The whole world shifts around on you
33:31Because the question is if you're not in control of that, what the hell is directing it?
33:36What's going on?
33:38It's not you
33:39It's not under your control
33:41It's not random. It's alive. It's dynamic
33:44It has an orientation towards something
33:46That's the Jungian self.
33:48Or that's the manifestation of meaning
33:50Yes very strange
33:53I told you this already
33:54See there's an old representation, a very old represenation of the snitch right there
33:59Now this is an old symbol, eh?
34:02You've got this dragon of chaos here
34:04It's kind of like an octopus as well
34:06That twist in its tail refers to infinity. Dragons almost always have an infinite tail like that
34:11And it's got the claws of a bird, maybe a bird of prey
34:14The body of an animal and the head of a snake
34:17And then down here
34:19You see its got the sun up there so it's sort of aiming upwards towards the sun this thing
34:23And then down here is this thing called the round chaos. It's an old alchemical system
34:27And if you look the dragon is fertilizing this
34:31And that has potential in it like an egg
34:34It's full of potential
34:37And so it's matter and spirit at the same time
34:41It's sort of like it's a representation of that which you're exploring
34:45Because you could say well the thing that you're exploring
34:47It's sort of a constructivist idea
34:49You explore something new
34:51What do you generate from the exploration?
34:53You. Because as you explore it you learn things. That changes you.
34:57So you generate psyche out of the exploration. That's spirit.
35:00And you also generate the world out of it
35:02But the thing to begin with is psyche and world at the same time
35:06And that's what this thing represents
35:08And that's what Harry Potter is chasing
35:10That's what makes him a seeker
35:13Very strange ideas
35:14Now I'm going to tell you a dream
35:16There was a dream I had while working on these ideas
35:18And I'm going to tell you the dream for two reasons
35:20One is because it bears directly on these ideas
35:23Two because well we just covered psychoanalytic thought and I want to show you how a dream can work
35:29Cause it's not easy to find a dream that you can interpret in a way that's public that makes sense
35:33Cause they're usually so tightly defined contextually
35:36You can define them in the therapeutic context because you know so much about the person
35:41It's very hard to pull that out and make it meaningful outside of that context
35:44But this dream works. Ok so,
35:46I was dreaming
35:48I was dreaming that there was a small object. It was a circle, a sphere about this big.
35:53And it was floating on top of the Atlantic Ocean
35:56And I had kind of a birds eye view of it and I was following it along
36:00Like maybe you know like a drone would follow behind an object
36:03And it was floating
36:05And it was really zipping along man, it was really really fast
36:08And then the scene shifted
36:10To a bunch of scientists they were sitting inside a room full of television monitors
36:15And they were watching this thing move across the Ocean
36:17And so it was here and it had four hurricanes beside it one here, one here, one here, and one here
36:24So it was in the center of four hurricanes
36:26So whatever it was was like some bloody potent thing zipping across the ocean
36:33Then the scientists got a hold of it I guess and the scene shifted
36:36And I was in a museum like an old Victorian museum
36:40And this thing, this ball was now inside a
36:43Imagine a wood stand
36:46With a glass case on top of it
36:48It was inside the glass case and it was floating and it was sort of pulsing a little bit
36:52And so inside the room there was Stephen Hawking
36:56And the American President
37:00I don't remember who it was he was sort of faceless
37:02But Stephen I thought, Stephen Hawking? What the hell
37:05Disembodied intellect
37:07That's Stephen Hawking so that's what that meant
37:09And the President well he's just the symbol of order
37:13And so this thing whatever it was that was surrounded by these winds
37:17Had been placed into a category system right?
37:19It was in a museum, it was boxed in. It had been conceptualized and categorized
37:24Partly by disembodied intellect, that was Stephen Hawking, and partly by social order
37:29And so there's a Binswanger Boss thing going on there
37:32The thing pulses and is alive so its got its own power
37:36But it's also encapsulated in a category system
37:39So I'm a third person observer in there I'm not in the room I'm just seeing this
37:43So that was fine
37:44So the next thing that happened
37:45Oh yes, one of them described the features of the room
37:48Its walls were seven feet thick
37:50They didn't want this thing going anywhere
37:52And it was made out of titanium dioxide
37:55I thought, what the hell is that?
37:56Well it's a paint
37:57It's a paint substance but it's also what the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of
38:02So my dream was saying well what's the hardest substance there is? Well it's titanium dioxide
38:07It's not getting out of that box
38:10The walls were designed to permanently constrain the object
38:12Okay now the next thing that happened was this object was
38:15You could tell it was kind of alive
38:17And it kept shifting around and at one point it turned into a chrysalis you know a cocoon
38:22And I thought what the hell does that mean?
38:24And then, so it turned into a cocoon
38:27And I don't know if you've seen a chrysalis when it's just about to hatch
38:30But it twitches around eh? It's alive that thing
38:34So they're very strange things
38:36And then at the end it turned itself into a pipe
38:38Like a Meerschaum pipe
38:40And I thought
38:42Then it reformed itself into a sphere
38:43And just shot right out of the room
38:45Like the walls weren't even there
38:47It decided it was gone bang! It was gone
38:50And I woke up and I thought what the hell
38:52What the hell does that mean?
38:54It took me forever to figure this out
38:56So then about two years after experiencing this dream,
39:00I was reading Dante's Inferno
39:02In the ninth Canto, a messenger from God appears
39:05So Dante goes down into hell right?
39:07It was Dante's attempt to describe
39:10It's brilliant
39:12So imagine that you go to a bad place psychologically right?
39:15So your life has collapsed that's terrible
39:18But then you're trying to figure out what you did wrong and how you're to blame for it
39:22And so what you do is a descent
39:24A descent into your own foolishness and stupidity
39:28Level, by level, by level
39:29And that's what Dante was trying to explain
39:31That's what that hell was
39:33Levels of catastrophe and there's something right at the bottom
39:37And he found that it was betrayal that was at the bottom
39:40So in any case I was reading that
39:43And there's a line in there that made me remember this dream
39:45Cause I tried to figure out this dream for years eh
40:27So that was like a herald of the arrival of this messenger
40:30It's a very powerful scene
40:31And I thought about this dream with this thing with the four storms
40:34So
40:36The pipe thing that really, that really took me forever to figure out
40:41And I finally remembered this painting by Magritte
40:43This is not a pipe
40:45Right so what does that mean?
40:49Well what it means is the representation is not the thing
40:55It's a very famous painting right?
40:57The representation is not the thing
41:01Well even the perception is not the thing
41:03And that's what the dream was trying to get at
41:04It's like this thing
41:06This thing that was so powerful and so capable of transforming
41:10Could be encapsulated temporarily within a conceptual system
41:13But whenever it decided to leave it was just going to leave
41:16And so
41:17What is was referring to was the potential that there is inside objects
41:21So for example
41:22And it's such a complicated thing to explain
41:25Nobody knew what cell phones were going to do
41:28You make the cell phone
41:30You think you know what it is
41:31You don't know what it is
41:33No one knew what the birth control pill was going to do
41:36You make it, you think you know what it is, you have no idea what it is
41:39And it's going to do some of the things you think it will do
41:41And it's going to do a bunch of things you have no idea about
41:45And that's because
41:46Things are more complex than they look
41:48They're multi-dimensional and they have
41:50I wouldn't say a life exactly but they have an intrinsic complexity
41:54That tends to unfold across time
41:56And it's only somewhat predictable
41:58And so you have things under your control and in your grasp to some limited degree
42:03But at any point it's like the switch in the yin yang symbol
42:06At any time chaos can collapse into order
42:09Or order can collapse into chaos
42:11And that's what that dream meant
42:14Another painting by Magritte trying to express the same thing right?
42:18All men in suits, all uniform, all thinking the same way
42:22Same haircuts, completely socialized
42:24Blinded by their own perceptions
42:27That's us
42:28Cause you think well your perceptions illuminate and bring you information
42:32It's yes and no
42:34They also constrain to equal degree
42:38I dreamed much later about a year later
42:40This was a very cool image too
42:42You know that image I think is it Da Vinci or Michelangelo
42:46Of the man inscribed in the square inside the circle
42:48It's a very famous image
42:50Well it was like that except
42:52It was a cube and not a square
42:54And so there was kind of a faceless person, almost like a mannequin inside this cube
42:59And he was suspended about two feet off the ground
43:02And on the front wall
43:05It was like wall paper designs, there were these little squares about this big
43:08And they mandalas square with circles inside them
43:12And then inside the circle there was a little snake tail that was out
43:15And the whole wall was covered with these snake tails
43:18And the person
43:20When the person walked forward the wall would move forward
43:22And when he walked backwards the wall would move backwards
43:24So it was always this far away
43:27And he could reach out and pull any of those snakes into being
43:31And so that was another dream of the same sort of idea
43:33What do you have in front of you?
43:35A world of objects
43:36No
43:38You have a world of potential in front of you
43:41And you can interact with any aspect of that potential
43:44And while you're doing so, you realize it
43:46You pull something into being that wouldn't have been there before
43:49And what you see in front of you is a wall of potential
43:53The potential is not infinite because you're constrained
43:56But, it's still
43:58For all intents and purposes it will do you just fine it's more potential than you could ever need
44:02And so the dream
44:04See dreams
44:07Dreams are at the forefront of thinking
44:11They get there before you
44:13The creative imagination is at the forefront of thinking
44:16If you think that you're moving out into the unknown
44:19To gather new information
44:21What gets there first is the imagination
44:23Obviously that's what Piaget says about children as well
44:26You imagine it first
44:28Then maybe you can represent it in speech
44:30And a dream is part of that imaginative process
44:33That's what artists are doing
44:35They're going out into the unknown
44:37And representing it imaginatively
44:39So what does that painting mean?
44:41Well if the artist knew that he'd just write it down
44:44Right? The art is beyond what's articulable otherwise it's not art it's just propaganda
44:51So the artist and the dream their out on the frontier right? That's the open imagination
44:56And so when you're conceptualizing new things
44:58The dream and the imagination can bring you places that you don't even know that you can go
45:03And it's a mystery too
45:04It's like I don't know how I figured this out
45:06It was as if the figuring out manifested itself inside me
45:10Cause that's the experience in a dream right?
45:12You don't feel "I dreamed this up"
45:14You feel "I had a dream." Where did that come from?
45:19It springs out of the unknown and offers something to you
45:31Here's pathology as conceptualized by the phenomenologists
45:36It's a very interesting way of thinking about it
45:38Existential guilt and fear as debt to possibility
45:41Well so there's this idea
45:43It's like an exisitential idea that you have some problems
45:47That you have some problems in your life
45:48Well part of the Dasein is the sense of responsibility that you have to address those problems
45:54It's part and parcel of the way that human beings manifest themselves in the world
45:58So part of your pathology would be failure to bear the responsibility for your being
46:03And a sense that you have a debt to your existence
46:06And according to the phenomenologists that's built right into the sense of your being
46:14It's a remarkable conceptualization
46:21Right well that's a good place to stop
46:24Okay good we'll see you in a week and a half