but the stories that I want to cover tonight, one of the things that just absolutely staggers me about them,

especially the story of Cain and Abel (which I hope to get to) is, like, it's so short. It's unbelievable.

It's like ten, eleven lines.

There's nothing to it at all.

And I've found that it's essentially inexhaustible in its capacity to reveal meaning, and I don't exactly know what to make of that.

I mean I...

I think, you know, because I said I was going to take as

rational an approach to this issue as I possibly could, I think it has something to do with

this intense process of condensation across very long periods of time. That's the simplest explanation.

But I'll tell you, the information in there is so densely packed that it really is--

it's really-- it's not that easy to come up with an explanation for that. Not one that I find fully compelling.

I mean, I do think that the really old stories (and we've been covering the really archaic stories in the Bible so far)

I think that one of the things that you can be virtually certain about is that everything about them

that was memorable was remembered, right, and so in some sense

And this is kind of like the idea of Richard Dawkins idea of memes, which is often why I thought that Richard Dawkins

if he was a little bit more

mystically inclined he would have become Karl Jung, because their theories are unbelievably similar. The similar of meme and the similar of arch...

the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious are very, very similar ideas except Jungian ideas-- far more profound in my

estimation well it just is he thought it [through] so much better. You know

Because Dawkins tended to think of memes sort of like a mind worm you know something that would infest a mind and maybe multiple minds

But he never really took I don't think he really ever took the idea with the seriousness it deserved

And I did hear him actually make a joke with Sam Harris the last time they talked about the fact that that

there was some possibility that the

Production of memes say religious memes could alter evolutionary history, [and] they both avoided that topic instantly

They had a big laugh about it men decided they weren't going to go down that road

and so that wasn't fair that was quite [interesting] to me, but

these

Is the the the density of these stories I do really [think] still is a is a mystery it

Certainly has something to do with their absolute

[their] in their impossibility to be forgotten [you] know and that's actually something that we could be tested empirically

I don't know if anybody has ever done that because you could tell

naive people two stories even equal length right one that had an archetypal theme and the other that didn't and then wait three months and

See which one's people remembered better and be relatively straightforward thing to test

I haven't tested it, but maybe I will at [some] point, but anyways, that's all to say that. I'm very

Excited about this lecture because I get an opportunity to go over the story of Adam and eve and the story of cain and Abel

And I [hopefully] [manage] both of those today, and maybe we'll get to the story of Noah and the tower of babel as well

But I wouldn't count on it not arthur eight we've been not at the rate we've been progressing if that's okay

That's that's no problem. It's there's no sense rushing this [alright]. So we're going to go before we go that before we do that

I want to

Finish my discussion of the idea of the psychological significance of the idea of God, and I've been thinking [about] this a lot more

You know because of course this lecture series gives me the opportunity and the necessity to continue to think and you know it

Certainly is the [case] so the hypothesis that I've been developing with the trinitarian idea is something like

That the trinitarian idea is the earliest

Emergence in image of the idea that there has to be an underlying cognitive

Structure that gives rise to consciousness as well as consciousness itself and so what I would suggest

Was that the idea of God the father is something akin to the idea of the a priori?

structure that that gives rise to consciousness

You know that's an inbuilt part of us, so that's our structure. You could think about that as something

That's been produced over a vast evolutionary time span

and I don't think that's completely out of keeping with the with the

With the ideas [that] are laid forth in Genesis one at least if you think about them from a metaphorical perspective

And it's hard to read them literally because I don't know what you know. There's an emphasis on day and night, but

The idea of Day and night as as 24-hour diurnal. You know

daytime and nighttime

Interchanges [that] are based on the claw on the earthly clock seems to be a bit

Absurd when you first start to think about the construction of the cosmos so just doesn't seem to me that a literal interpretation

is

Appropriate and I mean it's another thing that you might not know but you know many of the early church [fathers] one of them origen

in particular stated very clearly this was in 300 ad that these ancient stories were to be taken as as

Wise metaphors and not to be taken literally like the idea that the people who established

Christianity for example were all the sorts of people who were biblical [literalist]. It's just absolutely historically wrong

[I] mean some of them were and some of them still are that's not the point

Many of them weren't and it's not like people who live 2,000 years ago were stupid by any stretch of the imagination

And so they were perfectly capable of understanding what constant you know what constituted something approximating a metaphor and also knew that

fiction in some sense

Considered as an abstraction could tell you truth that nonfiction wasn't able

Wasn't able to get at lets you think that fiction is only for entertainment

And I think that's a very that's a that's a big mistake to think that so

Alright, so here we go

so yes

so with regards to the idea of God the father, so the idea is that

In order to make sense out of the world you have [to] have an a priori cognitive

Structure that was something that immanuel kant as I said last time

put forward as an argument against the idea that all of the information that we

Acquire during our lifetime [is] a consequence of incoming sense data and the reason that kant objected to that and he was

Absolutely right about this is that you can't make sense of sense Data without an a priori structure

You can't extract from sense data the structure that enables you to make sense of sense data

It's not possible, and that's really being demonstrated

I would say Beyond the shadow of a doubt since the 1960s and the best

demonstration of that was actually the initial failure of artificial intelligence

because when the AI people started promising that we would have fully functional and autonomous robots and artificial intelligence back in the

1960s

What they didn't understand and what stole them terribly until about the early 1990s was that it was almost

That the problem of perception with a much deeper problem than anybody ever

Recognized because like when you look at the world you just see well look there's objects out there and by the way you don't

Objects you see tools just so you know in the neurobiology. That's quite clear

You don't see objects and infer utility

You see useful things and infer object so it's actually the reverse of what people generally think but the point is is that

Regardless of whether you see objects or useful things when you look [at] the world you just see it

And you think well seeing is easy because they're the things are and all you have to do is like you know turn your head

And they appear

And that's just so wrong that it's it's almost impossible to overstate

Like the problem of perception is staggeringly difficult and one of the primary reasons that we still don't really have autonomous robots

so there were a lot closer to it than we were in the

1960s because it turned out that you actually have to [have] an embodied you have to have a body before you can say it and

Even more importantly you [have] to have a body before you can see

Because the act of seeing is actually the act of mapping the patterns of the world [onto] the patterns of the body. It's not

Things are out there you see them then you think about them, then you evaluate them

Then you decide to act on them and then you act. [I] mean that you could call that a folk idea of

Psychological processing or a perception it's not that is not how it works like your eyes for [example] map

One of the things they do is map right onto your spinal cord for example

They might right onto your emotional system

So it's actually possible for example

For people to be blind and still be able to detect facial expressions

Which is to say you can with someone who's cortically blind so they've had their visual Cortex

Destroyed often by a stroke they'll tell you that they can't see anything

But they can guess which hand you put up if you ask them to and if you flash them pictures of Angry or Fearful

Faces they show skin conductance responses to the more emotion laden faces

And it's because imagine that the world is made out of patterns which it is then imagine that those patterns are transmitted to you

Electromagnetically you have to light and then imagine that the pattern is duplicated on the retina

And then that pattern is propagated along the optic nerve and then the pattern is distributed throughout your brain and some of that pattern

Makes up what you call conscious vision, but other parts of it

Just activate your body so for example when I look at this when I look at this this

whatever it whatever it is a

Bottle that's words, huh?

You know when I look at it

Especially with intent in mind as soon as I look at it the pattern of the bod of the bottle

activates the gripping mechanism of my hand and

Part of the action of per Sortie the active perception is to adjust

My bodily posture including my hand grip to be of the optimal size to pick that up

And it's not that I see the bottle and then think about how to move my hand

That's too slow

It's that I use my motor motor Cortex to perceive the bottle and that's actually somewhat

Independent of actually seeing the bottle as a conscious experience

so

Anyways, huh the reason the reason that I'm telling you that [all] of that

And there's much more about that that can be told

Rodney Brooks ['is] someone to know about he's a robotics engineer who worked in the 1990s and he invented the Roomba

among many other things so he's a real genius stuffed guy and

He works was one of the first people to really

Point out that

to have to be [able] to have a

machine that

Perceived well enough to work in the world

That you had to give it a body and that the perception would actually be built from the body up rather than from the abstract

cognitive perceptions down and so

well

and that that turned out to be the case and bird rooks boiled all sorts of weird little machines in the

1990s that didn't even really have any central brain but they could do things like run away from [light] and

so they could perceive light that their perception was that act of running away from right and

So perception perception is very very very tightly tied to action in ways that people don't normally perceive

Anyways, that's all to say that you cannot perceive the [world] without being embody and you know your embodied in a manner

that's taken you roughly three and a half billion years to pull off right there's being a lot of death as a

Prerequisite to the embodied form that you take and so it's taken all that trial and error to produce something like you that can interact

with the complexity of the world well enough to last the relatively paltry 80 or so years that you can last and

So I think about that as this may be wrong, but I think it's a useful at least it's a useful

Hypothesis, I think the idea

God the father is something like the birth of the idea that there has to be an internal

Structure that out of which consciousness itself arises that gives form to things and well

And if that's the case and perhaps it's not but if it's the case it's certainly reflection. It's a reflection of the kind of

Factual truth that I've been describing now

and then like I also mentioned that I kind of see the idea of

Both the holy Spirit and those also of christ and most specifically of christ in in the form of the word

as

the active consciousness that that structure produces and uses not only to to

Formulate the world because we formulate the world at least the world that we experience

We formulate but also to change and modify that world because there's absolutely no doubt that we do that

Partly with our bodies which are optimally?

Developed to do that. Which is why we have hands unlike dolphins would have you know very large brains like us

But can't really change the world. We're really

adapted and evolved to change the world and to world and our speech [is] really a an

Extension of our ability to use our hands, so the speech systems that we use are you know very [well-developed] motor?

very well-developed motor skill and

generally speaking your your dominant linguistic hemisphere is the same as your dominant hand and

People talk with their hands like [me] as you may have noticed [and] we use sign language

and there's a tight relationship [between] the use of the hand and the use of language, and that's partly because

language is a

productive Force and the hand is part of it part of what changes the world and so all those things are tied together in a

Very very complex way with this a priori structure and also with the embodied structure

And I also think that's part of the reason why classical christianity puts such an emphasis not only on the divinity of the spirit

But also on the divinity of the body, this is a harder thing to

grapple with you know it's easier [for] people to think if you think in religious terms at all that you have some sort of

Transcended spirit that somehow detached from the body that might have some life after death [something] like that

but the Christian Christianity in particular really insists on the divinity of the body, so the idea is that

There's an underlying structure. It's this quasi patriarchal nature partly because it's for complex reasons

But partly because it's a reflection of the social structure as well as other things and then that

uses consciousness in the form particularly of language

But most particularly in the form of truthful language in order to produce the world in a manner

That's good, and I think that's a walloping

Powerful Powerful idea especially the relationship between the idea that it's truthful speech that gives rise to the good because that's a really fundamental

Moral Claim and I think that's a tough one to beat man because one of the things I've really noticed is and then this and

It isn't just me that's for sure is that you know there's a lot of tragedy in [life]

There's no doubt about that and lots of people that I see for example in my clinical practice are

Laid Low by the Tragedy of life

But I also see very very frequently that people get tangled up in deceit in webs of deceit that are often multiple

Generations long and that just takes them out you know and so that so deceit can produce