Set forth for you last week was that

the most real Things are

the things that are most permanent across time and and that

Manifests themselves in the largest number of situations and those are the things that you have to map successfully in order to survive

survive of individuals that survive as a species over a very long period Of time and so

the question is one question is

what are the

constants of experience if you are a

follower of the Evolutionary

Psychologists and to some degree the evolutionary biologist, but I would say more the psychologists

like to be in close Metis

They have a very afro centric

view of Human evolution and the idea basically is that

After we diverged from the common ancestor between Chimpanzees Bonobos and human beings

We spent a tremendous amount of time in the african environment

Mostly on the veldt although. We're not absolutely certain about that

We're also very good in water human beings and we have some of the features of aquatic mammals

so

while hairlessness being one of them

Women have a subcutaneously

They are fat or feeder quite nicely adapted for swimming and so buckminster fuller who I wouldn't call a mainstream

evolutionary psychologist

Hypothesized back in the 70s that we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history living on beaches near the ocean

That idea really

Echoes for me because we like beaches a lot, and it's a great place if you want to get easy food

And we're pretty damn good at swimming for for Terrestrial mammals

And we are hairless

And we do cry salt tears and there's a lot of evidence that we and our feet if you think about our feet

They're quite flipper like I know we are stand up and all that and walk, so that's part of the adaptation

But we're pretty good at swimming

so

anyways

The classical evolutionary psychology view is that we spent most of our time on the African veldt?

It in the critical period of our evolutionary development

let's say after we diverged from this common ancestor, and that were adapted for that environment and one of the

consequences of that is the idea that we're that things have changed so much around us that we're really not adapted to the

environment that we're in anymore, and I really believe that because I think that the idea that the

primary Forces that shaped our evolution

shaped them during that period of time

call it A

Roughly a seven million period Year period of time something like that and

That that was somehow a special time for human evolution that set our nature. I don't believe that

I mean, it's true to some degree, but

it's more useful to view the evolution of human cognitive processes over the entire span of

Evolutionary history and not necessarily give preference to any particular

Epoch and I certainly believe that the idea that we're no longer adapted to the environment because of our rapid technological

Transformations is simply not true and the reason. I think that it's not true is because the fundamental constants of the

Environment let's say or it's more of the fundamental constants constituent elements of being I think that's the right way to think about it

They're the same they haven't changed a bit

and there is no way of changing them as far as I can tell without us being radically and

Incomprehensibly different than we are and you know with with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and robotics and all of that

It's certainly possible then in five hundred years will be completely

Will be so like unlike the way we are now that we won't even be the same creatures

I don't think that's a particularly great outcome, but it's certainly possible. So what are the fundamental?

constituent Elements

Well, they're expressed in mythology, but they're not merely symbolic. I think it's the wrong way to think about it

They're symbolic, but they reflect a very deep reality and they actually reflect a reality that's not easily apprehensible

Directly by the senses now your senses are tuned for a particular duration

That's roughly excuse me

That's roughly the duration that you live let's say

But more importantly it's the duration whatever that duration is across which meaningful actions take place

And we kind of have some idea of what that duration is. You know if you look at a

computer screen if

it has a

Refresh rate of less than 60 Hertz you can see it's liquor abut above 60 Hertz you can't its uniform and with movies

Anywhere between 20 and 50 frames a second is enough to give you the illusion of continual motion

so you know we live in a universe that's

Above the tenth of a second domain or maybe the hundredth of a second somewhere in there anyways

And I mean it's not like time isn't almost infinitely subdivide

At higher levels of resolution than that, but we don't operate

generally speaking at higher temporary

A something approximating 1/2 a second to a second you know I mean, it's an estimate obviously

but a

second is a

meaningful unit of time for a person and a hundredth of a second really isn't and certainly a billionth of a second isn't and then

You know we can think across hours and days and weeks and months

But we really can't once you start getting out in two years it gets kind of sketchy and it's hard to think more than five

Years down the road and the reason for that is that the particulars upon which you're basing your predictions are likely to change

Sufficiently over a five year period So that extending out your vision past that just exposes you to accelerating error

Right and that and of course that's the problem with predicting the future period So we live in a time range

That's about say a tenth of a second to three three years something like that now

I know it can expand Beyond up

But that's that's kind of where we're set and our senses seem to be tuned to those durations and and to be

Operative so that we make proper

Decisions within those durations and and also from from a particular spatial position and so forth you know

Your eyes see what's roughly

Maybe we could say a walkable distance in front of you something like that, so

Then you get detect things and in the locale that enables you to immediately interact with things

But it isn't necessarily the case that senses that are tuned to do that are

Also tuned to inform you directly about what the most permanent things about being itself are I think that those things have to be?

Inferred and there's some there's some supporting evidence for that kind of thing from

from pSycholinguistics

there's a level of

categorization that we seem to

Manifest more or less automatically or implicitly so for example when children perceive?

Animals they they perceive at the level of cat or dog

They don't they don't perceive at the level of subspecies like siamese cat or or?

Or or let's say samoyed you know there's this. There's a natural

I can't remember what they call that base category something like that

it's usually specified by very short words that are easily learn about and so the

Linguistic system seems to map right on to the to the object recognition

Characteristics of the Sensory systems that are built right into it and and if they weren't built into it

We couldn't communicate easily because our natural categories. I think that's it, but it's probably wrong our natural categories

They have to be the same for every one or it would be very difficult for us to communicate, okay?

So having said all that then the question is

Well, what are the most?

What are the most real categories?

and I think there's there's a real division in ways to think about this because there's a scientific way of thinking about it and

And in in that case the most real categories are well

mathematical equations certainly seem to be and in the top category there that equations that describe the

physical universe, but then then the

hypothesis of

the existence of such things as protons and and

electrons, and you know that the material elements that make up everything that's every element of being the

possible exception of empty space

But in the in the mythological world the categories, I think are more derived from Darwinian

by the effect of Darwinian processes on cognitive and perceptual function

So which is to say that we have learned to perceive and then to infer those things that are most necessary?

For us in order to continue our existence

Propagate live well all of those things and that would be true at the level of individual survival

And maybe it's also true at the level of Growth survival although

You know the there's a tremendous debate among evolutionary biologists about whether or not selection can take place at the level of the group

Anyways there are these basic level categories that manifest themselves to you and then there's categories of the imagination that you have to infer up

from the sensory domain and we do that partly in Science by

Comparing our sensory representations across people

But we also do it by thinking abstractly conceptualizing abstractly

And you know one of the things that's interesting about

Abstractions is it's not clear whether they're more or less real than the things they're abstracted from you know that this is a perennial debate

among let's call them ontology who are

interested in that fundamental fundamental nature of reality itself in some sense independent of Conceptual structures are

numbers more or less real than the things they represent it's a really hard question to answer because

Knowing like using numbers as a representational system gives you unbelievable power

And there are mathematicians that believe that there isn't anything more real than mathematical

Representations now it depends to some degree of course on how you classify reality. That's the problem with the question like is a

Equivalent to be the answer that always is well it depends on how you define a and it depends on how you define b

So generally it's not a very useful question, but you can still get the point that there's something very real about abstraction

Incredibly real because otherwise why would you bother with them they wouldn't give you any handle on the world?

So what's the what's the most useful or what's the most?

What's the broadest possible level of abstraction and is there any use of?

any utility in thinking in that manner and I tried to

make the case last time that that in the

Mythological world there are three categories or four depending on what you do with the strange fourth Category?

There's a fourth category sort of the category of on categories able

entities and

So it's sort of the category of everything that not only do you not know but you don't know you don't know it's it's or

You can think about it as the category of potential. I actually think that's the best way to think about it

Is that it's the dragon of Chaos is the category of potential, and I do believe that

Where our materialist view is essentially wrong?

I think that the proper way of looking at the at being is that being is?

Potential and from that potential whatever consciousness is extracts out the reality that we inhabit anyways

that's certainly the mythological Viewpoint and and

But it's not just a mythological Viewpoint. It's a it's a

sequence of ideas for example that deeply underlies the thinking of young piaget and piaget by the way

it was very interested in reconciling the gap between

religion and science that's really what he devoted his life to doing and

So and there are other streams of philosophy and I would say heidegger the phenomenologist are are

Thinking along lines that are similar to this as well because heidegger was concerned not with the nature of material reality

but with being as such and and and

so

You can extract out the viewpoint that I just described from from Mythology, but it isn't the only source of such

What would you call it?

Hi

hypotheses is probably the right idea so the idea you can think about this as a

bootstrapping process in some senses in order for anything to get going it has to bootstrap itself up and

Become more and more complex as it does that so it's it's like

This is the answer to the chicken and egg problem

Right which was first the chicken or the egg well neither

Something from which both the chicken and egg were derived right because the the ultimate

The ultimate answer to that is the answer to how there are things at all who knows

but at some point there were neither chickens nor eggs, but there were the things that were the precursors to those things and so they

spiraled upwards in some sense and those in the initial

proto anta tease

single celled animals for I

Mean you can go back farther than that, but we could say well, single-cell animal is differentiated over time right, and there's this

Looping process

that that differentiates out into both the chicken and the egg so

but what the question is what do you need in order for that process to begin and

That's really the question of what the fundamental constituent elements of reality are and the mythological hypothesis. Is that there's or three or four?

One is the fact that there has to be something that that that that manifests itself as an observer

It's something like that some kind of observer now where that process of observation

Starts in the Phylogenetic chain is very very difficult to tell you know we might say well. There's certainly nothing

Of a conscious observer until there's a differentiated nervous system

But then prior to the emergence of differentiated nervous systems there were

Animals that were complex enough to react with the environment in a manner that well single-celled animals. They're quite complex

I mean some of them are unbelievably complicated. You know they can move themselves through space they can orient they can follow chemical trails

They're not they're not stupid by any stretch of the imagination