Okay, I told you I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories, right for more than two, but roughly speaking to, um, the creation stories because there's two of them in Genesis and then also the story of the Buddha.

And I was presenting you with a proposition, and it's a multi layered proposition.

The first proposition is that the archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories.

And the archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre existing state where things air roughly functional so that you might think of that as the state of things going well.

And that's a state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that when you act them out in the world, not only do you get what you desire, but the story itself validates itself through your actions, right, because what happens when you act something out and you get what you intend, just like when you use a map and get where you're going, Not only does that get you to where you're going, but it also validates the plan or the map and So that's that's That's a definition of truth.

That's a pragmatic definition of truth.

This is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris, because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is always insufficient.

We never know everything about anything.

And so the question then is, How can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct?

And the answer to that is something like, Well, you lay out a plan and you could think about it this way.

If this is actually an answer to the post modernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of the world is?

We won't say correct, because that's not exactly right.

But you know, the postmodernist subjects say, with regards to the interpretation of the text, that there's a very large number of variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted and that's actually true.

And it's the same.

It's it's actually reflection of a deeper claim, which they always often sometimes also make, which is well, if that's true for a text which isn't as complex as everything, although it's complex that it's even more true for everything.

Which is to say, the world lays itself out in a very complex manner, and you can interpret that in a very large number of ways.

So who's to say which interpretation is correct?

Okay, fair enough.

It's a reasonable objection, and it's it's tied in with even a deeper problem, which is the problem of perception itself.

Because if the world is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex, then how is it that you can even perceive it?

Well, that's that's partly the question that we're trying to answer.

And the answer to that is what you have evolved perceptual structures, and they're actually oriented towards specific goals and your embodied.

So the Your Embodiment as a goal directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception.

But it's more complicated than that.

So we could say, Well, you come equipped and this was Kant Objection to pure reason.

Essentially, that the problem is, is the facts don't speak for themselves.

There's too many facts for them to speak for themselves, so you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework.

Well, where does the interpretive framework come from?

Well, the right answer to that is something like.

It evolves, right?

It's taken 3.5 1,000,000,000 years for your perceptual structure, your body perceptual structure to evolve.

And it's done that roughly in a trial and error process.

I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution, but it's a good enough shorthand for the time being.

So so there's the constraints imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of survival and reproduction.

But there's other constraints imposed, too, that you might regard to subsets of that one.

Is that because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape, the perceptual structures and plans that you lay out will say the maps that you lay out have to be negotiated with other people, and so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed to to apply.

So you can think about this in a p, a jetty and sense.

That is, if their Children in the playground and they're trying to organize themselves to play.

They have to agree on a game, and the game is of course, a perceptual structure and a goal directed structure and a structure that the dilemma.

It's action and interactions and so they at least have to settle on a game.

And so that constrains the set of possible actions and perceptions in the environment to those that are deemed socially acceptable.

And then you say, Well, what are their further constraints?

And the constraints might be, Well, let's play the game and see if it's any fun.

And that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually and then lay it out in the actual world and see if when you lay it out in the world, it does what it's supposed to do.

In some sense, what you're doing is testing a tool.

So the idea that the range of interpretations is infinite and unconstrained turns out to be incorrect.

And now it's that, that is, that doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained.

But the technical suggestion that while there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations is just not correct.

It's not correct, and it's not correct on biological evolutionary grounds, and it's not.

It's also not correct on socio cultural grounds because it has to be negotiated.

And then, you know, PJ put a further constraint on that, essentially by saying, Well, not only does it have to be a game and a game that attains its hands, but it has to be a game that people want to play.

So it also has to satisfy some element of subjective desire as well.

So that's three levels of constraint, right?

It has to be a game you want to play.

It has to be a game that you can play with other people.

And it has to be a game that, if you play with other people, actually works in the world.

Okay, well, so much for an infinite array of of options.

It's a very constrained array of options now, and I think, and that the idea that I've been proposing to you is that what evolved mythology does These representations that we've been dealing with these archetypal representations is sketch out that landscape.

What what is the landscape of playable games?

That's a good way of thinking about it.

And so it's It sets out a landscape.

It sets out a description of the landscape in which the game is going to be played, as well as a description of the lens of the game itself.

And so the landscape is roughly the core.

The core archetypes seems to be something like It's It's something like the interplay between chaos and order and chaos is represented by the serpent tile predator because we use our predator detection circuits to conceptualize the unknown.

Because what else would we do that that seems, given that we're prey animals?

And given our evolutionary history, it's very difficult to understand what else we would possibly do, because the critical issue about venturing into the unknown is that you might die.

Or perhaps a slight variant of that is something might kill you.

But whatever those air close enough to the same thing, so chaos is what causes your deterioration and death.

There's lots of ways to conceptualize that, but but reptilian predator fire breathing reptilian predator isn't a bad way to start.

And so the question is, will.

What do you do in the face of that?

And one answer is, you build circumscribed enclosures.

That's order, and then also you act as the builder of circumscribed enclosure, so that's partly the hero.

Now the hero is also, though that's not good enough.

Because the circumscribed enclosure isn't impermeable, it could be invaded.

It will inevitably be invaded, either from outside or from within.

Right.

And so we've bean conceptualizing the predator, the malevolent predator at multiple levels of analysis, throat our evolutionary history, say, but also in our symbolic history, trying to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure.

Right?

And we can say, Well, it's partly external threat.

It's partly social threat.

But it's also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure because of our, let's say, our intrinsic malevolence.

And so that would be the snakes within.

And so that accounts for the analogy that the Christian analogy between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Satan, which is a very, very strange analogy it's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another, especially given that when the creation story originally emerged in, the four might talk to you about last week.

The story of Adam and Eve, the idea that the serpent in the garden was also something that was associated with the adversary wasn't an implicit part of the story that got laid on afterwards like, Well, what's the worst possible snake?

Well, that's a reasonable question.

And then a better question is, what do you do about the worst possible snake?

And one answer is, you face it.

But there's other answers to like you make sacrifices right?

And that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos.

Roughly speaking is that you learn to conceptualize the future.

You see the future as a realm of potential threat, and then you learn to give things up in the present, and somehow that satisfies the future now.

So maybe you're offering sacrifices to God.

And you think, Well, why does that?

Well, thank you.

Gotta think about that psychologically.

Why does that work?

Well, you could think about the spirit of God.

The father, as an imagistic representation of the collective spirit of the group, will call it the patriarchy if you want.

Doesn't matter.

It's the thing that's common across the group as a spirit, as a psychological force across time.

Why do you make sacrifices to that?

That is what you do all the time.

You're right now, you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the great Father, because your assumption is is that if you do what's diligent, so you're not chasing impulsive pleasure at the moment.

Unless you're pathologically interested in this class or something like that, you're not chasing impulsive interest.

You're sacrificing your impulsive interest to satisfy the spirit of social requirement.

And so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you could make a bargain with it so that it will reward you in the future.

And that reward will be parted partly the staving off of insecurity, which is no more than to say that part of the reason that you're getting your degree is because you believe that it will aid you and finding employment and status and all the other things that will stave off the dragon of Chaos.

So now those things were, as as we've being pains, Thio to point out is those things were acted out and then represented an image and story long before they could be fully articulated.

Because we're building our knowledge of ourselves and also our social structures and also the world from the bottom up as well as from the top doubt, there's an interplay between the two levels of analysis.

OK, and so go.

So that's partly that's partly the archetypal underpinning.

And then, with regards to the stories themselves, you're you're in a map, so to speak you're using a map, and with any luck, it's detailed enough so that you can use it to get to the place that you want to go.

And sometimes you don't.

And that means that you have to recalibrate your your journey along the map.

Which, by the way, is exactly what GPS systems do.

When you go off the pathway right, they stop.

That's an anxiety response from the GPS system.

They stop, they re calibrate, and they re adjust the map now and then.

If you're unfortunate, this very rarely happens anymore, you'll be on a road that isn't mapped, and then the GPS system doesn't know what to do.

While that happens in real life, too, I mean those air I'm using GPS for a very specific reason.

Those air intelligence systems, as far as I'm concerned, those are the closest things we ever designed to intelligence systems because they can actually orient, right, they Orient in real time.

And they're unbelievably sophisticated systems because they rely on a huge satellite network and and so on and their cybernetic systems.

Technically speaking, they respond very much like the way that we respond.

So so anyways, you know you're in.

You inhabit a map.

You try to adjust the resolution of the map so that it's more no more complex than it needs to be to get you from point A to point B.

That's it.

You want minimal resolution because that enables efficient cognitive processing doesn't overload you too much like when I'm looking at this room.

If I look, say, I want to walk down this pathway, basically what my mind does my perceptual field and you can detect this if I look straight ahead, I could barely see you people on the periphery.

You're more like your kind of like blurs you, too.

I can tell that you have heads, but that's about it.

When you move, I can see your hand.

I can probably see your eyes, but barely so you're all very low resolution.

And even though I can't detect it at the very periphery of my vision, you guys were black and white.

So my color vision disappears at the periphery.

Even though I can't I can't actually perceive that.

So what happens is if I want to walk down here, this pathway becomes high resolution.

It becomes marked with positive emotion.

All of this turns into low resolution back here.

It's not even represented.

And then I find out what am I doing this properly?

And the answer is while I walk forward and if I get to the goal, then I've done it properly enough.

And if you know one of you stand up and get in my way, then I'm gonna focus on you and assume instantly that I haven't mapped you properly, right.

I put you in the category of irrelevant entity when in fact you happen to be in the category of strange object, the thing that object, and so well.

So then we inhabit those structures all the time.

We're in a structure like that of perceptual structure, and if it's working, then it's got the archetypal quality of paradise, so to speak, because it's axioms, air correct, and it's functional.

And then now and then something comes along, and that's what the snake is the eternal snake in the garden that pops up inside a structure, and it turns out that the things that you weren't attending to are the most important things rather than least important things and that what does that do?

It blows the map into pieces, and that can happen at different levels of severity.

But at the ultimate level of severity, it's apocalyptic, right?

Everything goes, and that's a that's a traumatic intrusion.